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Title: The Hastings Road - And the "Happy Springs of Tunbridge"
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling and
punctuation remains unchanged.
Italics are represented thus _italic_, bold thus =bold= and
superscripts thus y^{th}.
THE HASTINGS ROAD
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
=The Portsmouth Road=, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.
=The Dover Road=: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
=The Bath Road=: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.
=The Exeter Road=: The Story of the West of England Highway.
=The Great North Road=: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.
=The Norwich Road=: An East Anglian Highway.
=The Holyhead Road=: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.
=The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road=: The Great Fenland Highway.
=The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road=: Sport and History on
an East Anglian Turnpike.
=The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road=: The Ready Way to
South Wales. Two Vols.
=The Brighton Road=: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.
=Cycle Rides Round London.=
=A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.=
=Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore.= Two Vols.
=The Ingoldsby Country=: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”
=The Hardy Country=: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
=The Dorset Coast.=
=The South Devon Coast.= [_In the Press._
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO HASTINGS, BY MINNIS ROCK AND THE OLD LONDON
ROAD.]
_THE_
_HASTINGS ROAD_
_AND_
_THE “HAPPY SPRINGS OF TUNBRIDGE”_
By CHARLES G. HARPER
_ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR_
[Illustration: Knight on horseback]
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1906
[_All rights reserved_]
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
PREFACE
[Illustration: Armor]
_The Road to Hastings is hilly. Not, perhaps, altogether so hilly as
the Dover Road, and certainly never so dusty, nor so Cockneyfied; but
the cyclist who explores it finds, or thinks he finds, an amazing
amount of rising gradient in proportion to downhill, no matter which
way he goes._
_Sevenoaks town, the matter of twenty miles down the road, is certainly
preceded by the long, swooping down-grades of Polhill; but the
lengthiest descent, by mere measurement in rods, poles, and perches,
is only an incident in descending, while the inevitable corresponding
rise is, the climbing of it, a long-drawn experience. To the motorist,
who changes from high-gear to lower, and then, as the gradient
stiffens, to lowest, and so with labouring engine crawls uphill, like
a bluebottle up a window-pane, the revulsion from charging along the
levels at an illegal pace, raising veritable siroccos of dust, is
heart-breaking._
_Sevenoaks town crests the ramparted downs, and the hilly road goes
up to it in steep lengths, with other lengths as near as may be flat,
leading you to believe you are there, when in sheer cold fact you are
not there, and still have other incredible gradients to climb. And yet,
returning, you shall find the descent by no means so precipitous. River
Hill by that time will have taken pride of place._
_For the other hills, let them be taken on trust; they are surely
there, as also are those long rises, insensible to the sight of the
toiling cyclist, but patent to his feeling as he wearily pushes round
his unwilling pedals. For the motor-cyclist, with disabled engine, the
Hastings Road is more tragical than anything Shakespeare ever staged._
_The_ HASTINGS ROAD _is, in short, the pedestrian’s road. You would
not say so much of the Bath Road or the Exeter Road between Hounslow
and Taplow, and Staines; nor even of the great North Road where it
runs flat through Bedfordshire and Hunts. There the way recedes ever
into the infinite, and there, if anywhere, the hurtling motorist is to
be excused of his illegality. Here, however, on the way to Hastings,
you linger by hillside and valley, for the road goes through the
most beautiful parts of Sussex and of Kent, and marches through much
diverting social and national history, to the scene of the crowning
tragedy of Battle. I am not of those who find the story of the Battle
of Hastings sheer dry-as-dust. It is to me a living story, though over
eight hundred years old, and it will live for you who explore that
stricken field, if so be you explore it away from the perfunctory
guides who parrot the half-holiday public through the grounds of Battle
Abbey._
_But they are not necessarily the larger happenings that interest me
in these pages. I can find it easily possible—nay, effortless—to turn
from catastrophic struggles, and take an absorbing interest in some
one’s back garden: that is the way to keep boredom at arm’s length. The
mediæval knight who swore by his “halidom,” and the modern hop-picker
who says “blimy!” (and stronger things than that) are both entertaining
persons; would that Time were bridged, and they could be introduced to
one another! What the knight and the “caitiff” would severally think of
either would be well worth the hearing._
_For mere topography: let us maintain an invincible curiosity as to
whence this river comes or whither it goes; as to what lies on the
other side of yonder hill, or at the end of some alluring byway. Let us
find entertainment in the manner in which the city, town, or village
next on the map is different from those we have already passed; and
with interests so varied the way will be all too short._
CHARLES G. HARPER.
PETERSHAM,
SURREY.
_April, 1906._
THE ROAD TO HASTINGS
MILES
London Bridge—
New Cross (New Cross Gate) 3¼
Loampit Hill 4½
(Cross Ravensbourne)
Lewisham (St. Mary’s Church) 5¾
Rushey Green 6½
South End 7¾
(Cross Ravensbourne)
Holloway 8¾
Bromley 10
Mason’s Hill 10¾
Bromley Common 12½
Lock’s Bottom 13¼
Farnborough 14
Green Street Green 15¼
Pratt’s Bottom 16¾
Halstead Station 18¼
Polhill 19½
Dunton Green 21¼
(Cross River Darent)
Riverhead 22
Sevenoaks (Station: Tubb’s Hill) 23
“ Town 24
River Hill 25¼
Hildenborough 27¾
Tonbridge 30
(Cross River Medway)
Pembury Green 35
Kipping’s Cross 36¼
Lamberhurst 40
Stone Crouch 43
Flimwell 44¾
Hurst Green 47¾
Silver Hill 48½
Robertsbridge 50¼
(Cross River Rother)
John’s Cross 51¾
Battle 55½
Starr’s Green 56¾
Baldslow 59
Ore 61¾
Hastings (Old Town) 63½
INTO HASTINGS BY “NEW LONDON ROAD”
Baldslow 59
Hollington 59¾
Silverhill 60½
Hastings (Albert Memorial) 62¼
[Illustration: LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]
SEPARATE PLATES
ENTRANCE TO HASTINGS, BY MINNIS ROCK AND THE OLD
LONDON ROAD _Frontispiece_
PAGE
LEWISHAM 19
ENTRANCE TO THE WIDOWS’ COLLEGE 27
IN THE FIRST QUADRANGLE, WIDOWS’ COLLEGE, BROMLEY 31
THE ROAD ACROSS BROMLEY COMMON 45
KNOCKHOLT BEECHES 59
AN OLD WAYSIDE COTTAGE, BELOW POLHILL 67
THE SOUTH FRONT, KNOLE (_Photo C. Essenhigh Corke & Co._) 99
THE PANTILES, TUNBRIDGE WELLS 127
THE TOAD ROCK 135
KENT 149
LAMBERHURST 155
SCOTNEY CASTLE 161
WEIRD OAST-HOUSES, LAMBERHURST 165
THE MOATED CASTLE OF BODIAM 183
“DUKE WILLIAM COMFORTS HIS YOUNG SOLDIERS” (_Central
Incident of the Battle of Hastings. From the
Bayeux Tapestry_) 211
BATTLE ABBEY 229
HASTINGS OLD TOWN 261
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
Business-Card of the “Bolt-in-Tun” Coach Office 9
The Colfe Almshouses 22
The Old Toll-house, Pratt’s Bottom 56
A Phyllis of Knockholt 61
Longford 69
Riverhead 72
Sign of the “Blackboy” Inn 78
Sign of the “Bricklayers’ Arms” 79
Old Mansion, formerly the “Cats” Inn 81
Seal of Sevenoaks Grammar School 83
Knole, from the Road 89
The Gateway, Knole 92
The Stone Court, Knole 95
The “Dumb Bell” 101
The Seven Oaks 103
The “White Hart” Inn 105
River Hill and the Kentish Weald 110
Tonbridge Castle 114
The “Chequers,” Tonbridge 118
A Sporting Weather-vane 119
Church of King Charles the Martyr 124
Tunbridge Ware 133
Scene at “High Rocks” 138
The Marquis of Abergavenny’s “A” 139
The Neville Gate, Frant 140
The “Blue Boys” Inn 143
Bayham Abbey: Across the Water-meadows 158
Etchingham Church 172
The Ancient Vane, Etchingham 174
Brass of Sir William de Etchingham 175
The Fox preaching to the Geese 176
The Abbey Farm 179
William the Conqueror (_Bayeux Tapestry_) 198
Last Stand of the English (_Bayeux Tapestry_) 213
Flight of the English Churls (_Bayeux Tapestry_) 215
A Descendant of the Saxon Churls 227
Battle Church 232
A Bye-road at Battle 233
The Road past Crowhurst Park 235
Junction of Roads spoiled by Tramways, Baldslow 238
“Huz and Buz”: Entrance to Holmhurst 241
Queen Anne, at Holmhurst 245
Ruins of the Old Church, Ore 247
The Old London Road 249
All Saints’ 253
Old House, All Saints’ Street 258
Old Tackle-boxes, Hastings 265
St. Clement’s Church 279
A Slain Norman (_Bayeux Tapestry_) 284
[Illustration:
_The
HASTINGS
ROAD_]
I
The road to Hastings is measured from what, in these times, seems the
unlikely starting-point of London Bridge, and is identical with the
Dover Road as far as New Cross, where it turns to the right and goes
through Lewisham, the Dover Road continuing by Deptford and Blackheath.
Few would now choose such a starting-point for a journey to Hastings,
but there is reason in most things, and when this road was first
travelled there was a very special reason for this choice. London
Bridge was, until 1750, the only bridge that crossed the Thames between
London and Putney, and the sole way to the southern counties therefore
lay through Southwark.
But in those comparatively early times the historian finds no mention
of the “Hastings” Road at all. Travellers very rarely wanted to
journey from London to that fisher village; and it is the road to Rye
for which the inquirer after these things must look in the classic
seventeenth-century pages of Ogilby’s “Britannia.” In that very
elaborate and accurate work, published in 1675, the Hastings Road
appears as the “road to Rye,” and thus, after Flimwell, 44¾ miles down,
where it makes as straight as may be for that once-busy port, the
chance pilgrim for Hastings had to find his way across country as best
he could by the directions of the country folk.
It is twenty miles from Flimwell to Hastings, and as I do not suppose
the rustics were nearly so well informed then as now as to routes and
distances, and as their knowledge on those matters is even now not
profound, I think we shall do well to feel sorry for that wayfarer of
long ago, thus left without a guide.
By the time the coaching age had arrived, and the road-books of Cary
and Paterson and a host of others began to be published, the “Hastings”
Road, rather than the road to Rye, had been invented, but still the way
lay over London Bridge, and was measured from the south side of it,
whence the distance is 63½ miles.
The traveller of to-day would probably find Westminster Bridge Road,
St. George’s Road, and the New Kent Road the best way out of London,
but it will be allowed that the best is bad.
As the imagination—whatever may be the facts—refuses to associate
the Borough High Street and the Old Kent Road with the sylvan
beauties of the road to Hastings, I do not propose here to recount the
description of those beginnings, given already in the pages of the
DOVER ROAD; but will, as Astley of the Circus suggested to the mere
dramatist, literally “cut the cackle and come to the ’osses,” _i.e._, a
consideration of the coaching history of the road.
II
The history of coaching on the Hastings Road will never be fully
written. There are too few materials for it. None of the great critics
of coaching—men of the eminence of “Nimrod” or “Viator Junior”—ever
wrote about the Hastings Road, for it was a road of many pair-horse
coaches, and “pair-horse concerns” were considered beneath the notice
of those lofty writers. Even the Royal Mail was a “pair-horse concern,”
and was looked down upon accordingly.
It is as the road to Sevenoaks, to Tonbridge, and to the “Wells” that
we first hear of this route in the coaching way; and, as ever, we hear
first of the carriers and their waggons. Goods were conveyed on wheels
long before travellers, and the heavy, cumbrous wains, drawn by eight
or ten horses, and rarely going three miles an hour, carried heavy
merchandise and the poorest kind of wayfarers quite a century before
the horsemen, riding singly or with their ladies on a pillion behind
them, took to what was at first considered the “effeminate” practice of
riding in coaches.
Thus the early glimpses of the road reveal Nathaniel Field, carrier,
plying in 1681 between Tonbridge and the “Queen’s Head” Inn, Southwark,
once a week, together with another carrier, unnamed, a competitor in
the business. In the same year “Richard Cockett’s Waggon” came twice
weekly to the “Spur,” Southwark, from “Sunnock, in Kent”; and from
“Brumly in Kent” came thrice a week “Widow Ingerham’s Waggon,” to the
“King’s Arms in Barnaby Street, Southwark,” together with “William and
Daniel Woolf’s Waggon,” on the same days.
There is sufficient evidence in the diary of Samuel Jeake, junior,
of Rye, that there was no coach further than Tonbridge, or Tunbridge
Wells, in 1682; for he tells us that, journeying from Rye to London
on May 22nd of that year, “I rode with my wife and mother-in-law for
diversion, and came thither on the 23rd; had hot and dry weather.”
Returning on June 23rd, they went “from London in the stage-coach to
Tonbridge; and on the 24th, Saturday, came to Rye at night.”
On January 23rd, 1686, he went to London by himself. Starting from Rye
at 8.30 a.m., he rode the twenty-three miles to Lamberhurst by 2 p.m.
Refreshing there for an hour, he resumed his journey, in company with
others, for the security afforded by numbers, and between Woodgate and
Tonbridge, in the moonlight, the tracks being very bad and uneven,
he and another became separated from the party, and immediately lost
themselves. It was freezing hard. He alighted and led his horse, until
at last, coming to a pretty good track, he remounted, and by the grace
of God and at a very late hour came into Tonbridge.
Whether this adventure was due partly to the good cheer of the
“Chequers” at Lamberhurst, or wholly to the uncertainty of the track,
it would be rash to say. But it is all very vivid to me: the brushwood
alleys, the rimy branches of the shrouded woods, the clear, cold
radiance of the frosty moon, the iron-hard ruts, and the breath arising
like steam from Mr. Samuel Jeake and his horse; but most real to me
his joy when he saw at last, at the foot of Somerhill, the lights of
Tonbridge town.
Next morning he left Tonbridge for London, and—being by himself—rode
horseback all the way, performing the journey of thirty miles in ten
hours.
The stage-coach of 1682, in which the worthy Samuel Jeake brought his
wife and mother-in-law, went no further than Tunbridge Wells. It was
probably, even at that date, no new thing, for the “happy springs of
Tunbridge” had long been known, and had for some years been gaining
popularity among real or fancied invalids. We may well suppose it to
have been started somewhere about 1650.
III
With the dawn of the nineteenth century the service of coaches between
London and Hastings begins to take some definite shape. In 1807
Robert Gray, of the “Bolt-in-Tun,” Fleet Street, horsed the Hastings
Mail, and continued for many years. In 1828 it was jointly run by
Gray and by Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden Cross.” Being only
a “pair-horse” mail, it was, like its fellows in the same category,
very slow. The Brighton, Portsmouth, and Hastings mails were, in
fact, the three slowest in the kingdom, and of these the Brighton was
the worst laggard. The mails, it should be explained, to correct the
impression created by the eloquence of De Quincey and Hazlitt, were not
_necessarily_ faster than the stage-coaches. In some instances they
were: in others they were not. Everything depended upon individual
cases, and much upon distance. Where great distances had to be
covered the speed would be very high, as in the Bristol, Devonport
(“Quicksilver”), and Birmingham mails, of which the first averaged
considerably over ten miles an hour; but in cases such as these of
Hastings, Portsmouth, and Brighton, all the night lay before them, and
the short distance could be taken very easily with pair-horse teams;
while the four-horse teams running to the West and North were always
upon their mettle, to keep their time-bills. The speed of the Hastings
Mail in 1837, its best period, averaged eight miles an hour; and that
in itself was a great advance from 1828, when the pace was under seven
miles an hour.
Mail-coaches were, therefore, not always the most dashing public
equipages of the King’s Highway. From about 1825, when the “fast”
day-coaches and the post-coaches began to set the pace, the mail on the
Hastings Road was for a time left hopelessly behind. In 1826 the “Royal
William,” starting from the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn, at 9 a.m.,
was at Hastings by 5 o’clock: speed rather more than eight miles an
hour. Prodigious!
But that rate was very poor in comparison with the stage-coaches of
almost every other road, and even in 1828, the Golden Age of coaching,
proprietors, in announcing “Hastings to London in Eight Hours” appear
to have considered themselves wonderful fellows. Indeed, on the
old coaching bills of this period, discovered in 1893, during some
alterations, on the walls of a building in Castle Street, Hastings, one
coach-proprietor had the impudence (as we must think it) of setting
forth “Hastings to London in 9 hours!” He did well to conclude with
that exclamation-mark, although he placed it there in a different sense
from that in which we read it.
There were then, among others, the Royal Mail, in 9¾ hours; the
“Express” (a misnomer, indeed), in nine hours, from the “Golden Cross,”
by Tunbridge Wells; “Paragon,” in eight hours, by Tunbridge Wells;
and “Regulator,” by Tonbridge. Hastings, therefore, was always badly
served, and must have grumbled quite as much in the coaching era as it
does under the dilatory service of the South Eastern Railway.
The last years of the Hastings Mail, or, as it was known in its two
ultimate decades, the “Hastings and St. Leonards,” were signalised by
a successful attempt on the part of Horne and Gray and their country
partners to screw an extra mileage rate out of the tight-fisted Post
Office for carrying the mails. It seems that the Mail had not been
keeping time, and that the partners had received some remonstrances
on the subject from St. Martin’s-le-Grand. It was a fine opening for
a revision, and accordingly, in December, 1841, they informed the
Postmaster-General that they really could not keep strictly to the
terms laid down by the contract they had signed in 1835, unless the
mileage rate were raised from 1⅜_d._ a mile to 3⅜_d._ The extra
allowance would permit of four horses being used instead of two: a
thing not only desirable, they said, but really necessary on so hilly
a road. In January, 1842, the Postmaster-General graciously acceded to
this request, and for its expiring years the Mail rose to this unwonted
dignity.
The “Bolt-in-Tun” coach-office in Fleet Street still stands at the
corner of Bouverie Street, somewhat altered, and now the offices of
_Black and White_. The walls are the same, and the archway depicted in
the curious business-card, reproduced here, may yet be noticed.
[Illustration: BUSINESS-CARD OF THE “BOLT-IN-TUN” COACH OFFICE.]
Of the coachmen on the road to Tunbridge Wells and Hastings we know as
little as—nay even less than—of the coaches, and almost the only touch
of character is that drawn by a writer in the _Sporting Magazine_ of
1830, in describing one Stockdale, who drove some coach unnamed. He
was, we are told, “a good whip.” He was also, like poor old Cross, on
the King’s Lynn road, something of a literary character, and “beguiled
the time on the road with Cockney slang and quotations from Pope!” He
drove to London and back six days a week—the Sunday, he said, he spent
at home studying the Greek Testament and translating Οἱ οἱ τυφοὶ ὁδηοί
into “Wo, wo, ye blind leaders!”
But coaches were by no means the only public conveyances along this
road. There were, indeed, in 1838, many vans and waggons to Tunbridge
Wells and to Hastings. Bennett’s vans and waggons plied to Tunbridge
Wells four times a week; those of Jarvis thrice, Diggen’s five times,
Barnett’s four, Shepherd’s three, Young’s and Harris’s twice, and
Wickin’s once: twenty-seven vans and waggons weekly to “the Wells.”
To Hastings the waggons respectively of Moore & Co., Shepherd & Co.,
Stanbury & Co., and Richardson journeyed daily.
IV
The electric tramcars that nowadays take you all the way to Lewisham
from Westminster Bridge for threepence, and occupy incidentally forty
minutes in performing the journey of six miles, travel on the average
at the same speed as those old coaches; but, of course, this not very
brilliant rate of progression is determined by the crowded traffic of
Walworth and Camberwell. When New Cross is reached, and the comparative
solitudes of St. John’s, they bring you at a good twelve miles an hour
along those switchback roads to the journey’s end. They are not looked
upon with favour by that suburban neighbourhood, for, worse than the
burglars’ “villainous centre-bits” in _Maud_ they not only
Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless night,
but noisily disturb every night.
It is a hilly district, revealed in these times by ascending and
descending vistas of roads and roof-tops, instead of the grass and
fields of yore; and Loampit Hill—the “Loam Pit Hole” of Rocque’s
map of 1745—is just a little interlude in the commonplace, where an
old retaining-wall in the hill-top sliced through in a bygone era
serves to keep the banks and the houses now built hazardously on them
from settling in the roadway. A number of old hollies give the spot
something of an old-world look.
Here, then, having come through all the hazards and chances of New
Cross and the Lewisham High Road, we are arrived at the Ravensbourne
and Lewisham. The Ravensbourne, although not a stream of great size,
and with a course of but twelve miles, from its fountain-head on Keston
Common to its mouth amid the mud of Deptford Creek, is yet a river of
considerable historic, or legendary, importance, and—more important
still—it is due to the Ravensbourne that the last surviving beauties
of Lewisham are so beautiful. Legends tell how the river obtained its
distinguished name, and in the telling take us back to those very
distant days of Cæsar’s second invasion, B.C. 54. The story seems to
support the theory of one school of antiquaries, that the lost Roman
station of _Noviomagus_ was at Keston; for it declares that Cæsar’s
legions were encamped on what we now call Keston Common, and suffered
greatly from lack of water until the constant visits of a raven to one
particular spot attracted attention and aroused the hope that it was
water which attracted him. The expectation proved correct, for there
they discovered the spring forming the source of the stream. A well,
called “Cæsar’s,” on that common still serves to keep the tradition
alive.
We may, therefore, well look upon the Ravensbourne with interest,
although it is true that a glance into it, over the bridge which here
carries the busy London street across, sadly disappoints romantic
anticipations. Deposits of mud, vestiges of pails past their prime,
and outworn boots which the veriest tramp would scorn to own, line
a discoloured stream, and grimy backyards abut upon it. To such a
pass has civilisation brought the lower reaches of this once silvery
watercourse, which is not so small but that it has tributaries of its
own. Such an one is the river Quaggy, which embouches hereabouts into
it. “Hereabouts,” I say, because only the local sewer authority could
readily point out the exact spot; the Quaggy being, in fact, at the
actual confluence, embedded in an underground pipe. But if you may not
see the actual meeting of the streams, you may at least see the Quaggy
on the other side of the road, a little distance before it joins forces
with the Ravensbourne. There you shall perceive how only a little
lesser indignity than a pipe has befallen it. Its little trickle still
flows on in the eye of day, but it is made to flow in a formal concrete
bed, here and there spanned by long stretches of pavement. A little
higher up “Lee Bridge” crosses it, and there be those lesser Stanleys
and Livingstones who have traced it to its source, even as those great
explorers sought the beginnings of the Nile. A certain disappointment
seems, however, to await those who seek the origin of the Quaggy, for
those who have essayed, and accomplished, the feat describe how it
rises on Shooter’s Hill “at the back of the Police-station”! Shooter’s
Hill is well enough, but that last little piece of particularity
destroys any lingering shred of romance.
I should not be greatly surprised to find the Quaggy the object of
police suspicion, for that name is merely an alias, its real ancient
title being the Ket Brook, whence the district of Kidbrook derives its
name. The “Quaggy” is a later title, conferred descriptively by those
who observed the quags, or marshy places, through which it descended
from Shooter’s Hill to these levels.
Here, as already remarked, we are come to Lewisham. Many thousands
of people remember Lewisham as still something of a village; and yet
so quick-presto are the suburban changes around London that they now
behold it not merely a thronged town, but much less distinguished even
than that—just a limb of great, sprawling London, and thus stripped of
most of its old-time individuality.
The place changes while you look. You turn your back awhile upon the
few surviving fields, the hedgerows, the ditches, and when you glance
upon the scene again they are gone, and carts are delivering loads
of slack-baked place-bricks for the foundations of little £25 houses
that will begin to settle down unsteadily and crack all down their
fronts almost before the roofs are on. Change is rampant here, and
Lewisham, that was once “Lewisham Village,” is a village no longer. The
proverbial saying, “Long, lazy, lousy Lewisham,” that once attached
to the place—a saying which, I doubt not, owed its existence more to
easy alliteration than to actual fact—is, in one respect at any rate,
out of date, for it is now become a very strenuous place indeed,
where tradesfolk hustle for business and crowds throng the pavements.
Modernity marches all over the place in its hobnailed fashion, and
scarifies the soul out of existence. It cannot survive in a modern
populous suburb of wage-earners who go forth at unconscionable hours
of the morning to earn the means of existence and come home to their
brick boxes, exhausted, merely to sleep; and so come to their prime,
joylessly, and decline greyly to an obscure end. The spectacle
frightens and saddens the observer who goes beneath the surface of
things. He wonders what lies in the lap of futurity for the race thus
dissociated from nature, nurtured on the pavements, and condemned to
lifelong comings and goings in the restricted outlook of streets; and,
looking upon old representations of what Lewisham was like in what
he is apt to think the halcyon days of the “20’s” of the nineteenth
century, he grieves for the spacious rusticities of days gone by.
V
How many, or how few, of Lewisham’s myriads ever idly speculate whence
came the name of the place? According to authorities who are now,
in these more scientific times, largely discredited, it comes from
Anglo-Saxon words meaning “the dwelling among the meadows,” or the
leas—the “leas home”—and was anciently spelled Levesham and Lewesham.
Just a few vestiges of this ancient rurality remain, in the strips of
meadows—now converted into what are shaping as beautiful parks—that
fringe the course of the Ravensbourne on either bank, from Catford
Bridge to Ladywell; but we are now bidden disregard those meadows
in any relationship with the name of Lewisham. The place is first
mentioned in a charter of Ethelbert of Wessex, dated A.D. 862, in which
it is called “Liofshema”; and fifty-six years later, in a charter
granted by Ethelswitha, daughter of Alfred the Great, it assumes the
form of “Lieuesham,” which gives us exactly the modern pronunciation.
This, it has been remarked, has nothing to do with meadows, leas, or
pastures, but means literally “dear son’s home.” But, having reached
that point, we come to a full stop, for no one can tell us who was that
“dear son”; and the theory that the name of Leveson similarly derives
from Liof-or Leof-suna, seems to have little bearing upon the history
of the place.
Ladywell, just mentioned, is itself the name of a great crowded
district, and it is thus curious to reflect that the name was
utterly unknown until modern times. It arose from one of two closely
neighbouring wells—one reputed to be medicinal—situated in what is
now the road turning off the highway, past Lewisham old vicarage, to
Ladywell railway-station and Brockley, which name itself—meaning, as
it does, the “badger’s meadow”—enshrines the former rustic appearance
of these parts. Ancient records and county histories may be searched
in vain for mention of the “Lady Well,” which, oddly enough, seems
to have acquired its name about the end of the eighteenth century.
It was, about 1820, the subject of a published plate, showing it
with a circular stone kerb, placed by the wayside of a pretty rustic
road, embowered in trees. Thus it remained, amid ever deteriorating
surroundings, until 1866, when it was destroyed in the course of
sewer-making operations for the newly risen suburb that had grown
around the South-Eastern railway-station of “Ladywell,” opened in
January, 1857.
The well had long become a thing of the past, and its very site was
merely a matter of vague tradition, when, in 1881, its stones were
discovered in the course of repairs to the bridge over the railway.
A signalman rescued them from being again covered over, and removed
them to a position beside his cabin, where they remained until 1896,
when the following notice appeared in a local paper: “It has now been
decided by the Lewisham Baths Commissioners to re-erect the stones by
the side of the public baths, where they will be used to surround a
public fountain to which the youths and maidens of to-day may once more
resort, and there whisper their hearts’ desire.” Accordingly, they may
be seen to this day in the Ladywell Road.
It seems likely, under the circumstances thus recounted, that the well
was given its name about a century ago by some forgotten fanciful local
antiquary who, bethinking himself that the parish church of St. Mary,
Lewisham, was but a hundred yards or so distant, dignified the hitherto
unnamed spring by the name of Our Lady.
That parish church is a singular, and in general an unbeautiful,
structure, built in 1777 on the site of an older, and enlarged at
the east end, in the same hybrid “classic” style, in 1881. It has a
great south porch, unmistakably Corinthian, though it would puzzle an
architect to put a name to the rest. But the tower has a character all
its own. Equally nondescript, it yet owns an engaging quaintness which
one would with sorrow see improved away for the sake of something more
pure in style. The lower stages of this tower are obviously the remains
of the old Gothic building, for the buttresses, some of the windows,
and a good deal of the old facing are left, while the upper part has
either been rebuilt or re-cased in a style resembling the practice of
the brothers Adam. Sculptured garlands in the famous manner of those
architects give a daintily decorative effect, and, together with the
four stone balls which occupy the places usually given to pinnacles,
render Lewisham church-tower memorable and unmistakable among its
fellows.
It is now, in short, with the neighbouring Colfe Almshouses, the most
characteristic and distinctive thing left to Lewisham. The surrounding
churchyard is very large, and the approach is made beautiful by a long
arched yew walk, still charmingly rustic in appearance.
The almshouses, it seems, are doomed to destruction. They are relics of
the times when it could yet be said with truth of Lewisham that “its
convenient distance from the metropolis and its beautiful situation
have rendered it a favourite place of residence, and the neighbourhood
is thickly studded with gentlemen’s seats, many of which are splendid
mansions, and with numerous handsome villas, the country residences of
opulent merchants.”
Abraham Colfe, who founded these quaint old almshouses, was vicar of
Lewisham about the middle of the seventeenth century. He died in 1657,
and left property in trust for the purpose to the Leathersellers’
Company, who accordingly built them, as a tablet over the main entrance
informs the passer-by, in 1664.
[Illustration: LEWISHAM.]
Another survival is the handsome old late seventeenth-century vicarage,
already mentioned, standing a little out of its element, as it were,
beside the high road. It was built in 1692-3 by Dr. Stanhope, the
then vicar, and, as his surviving accounts tell us, it cost him £739
13_s._ to build. Dr. Stanhope, if we may accept the estimate of his
character given by his monument in the church, was one of the best,
for (_inter alia_) his “piety was real and rational, his charity great
and universal.... His learning was elegant and comprehensive, his
conversation polite and delicate, Grave without Preciseness, Facetious
without Levity. The good Christian and solid Divine and the fine
gentleman in him were happily united.”
That, I think, is the _ne plus ultra_, the last word, in monumental
eulogy. You cannot get better than the best, unless indeed you visit
modern Lewisham and do your shopping at its popular “stores,” where a
searching glance may discover “best fresh eggs” at one shilling and
sixpence a dozen, and “superior” at two shillings.
For the rest, a few strips of garden here and there border the high
road through modern urban Lewisham, sometimes owning elms that in the
old days were tall wayside trees. Here a giant workhouse, neighbouring
the Colfe Almshouses, serves by its presence to underline and emphasise
the social distance travelled—whether it be upwards or downwards
let those decide who will—between the seventeenth century and the
twentieth, and a few scattered weather-boarded cottages are left,
showing what manner of buildings were those that fringed the road
in days for ever gone. Midway between the date of those humble old
dwellings and the modern shops is one old-fashioned shop where they
sell hay, corn, straw, beans, and sweet-smelling seeds of all kinds.
The name over the fascia is “Shove,” singularly inapplicable to this
quiet, unassuming frontage.[1] To gaze upon its small-paned windows, to
see and scent the hay and the fragrant contents of its bins of beans,
peas, and varied seeds, must surely, with the coming of every spring,
set the prisoned wage-earners of Lewisham longing keenly for the
banished country whose breath comes fragrant from within.
[Illustration: THE COLFE ALMSHOUSES.]
[1] Alas! since writing the above, the shop is closed, and the house to
be demolished.
VI
The streets of Lewisham the long end, in the present year of grace,
a little beyond Rushey Green, where a side-road comes in from Forest
Hill and Catford Bridge. Shall we pluck the rushes of Rushey Green,
wander awhile in the groves of Forest Hill, or gather primroses by
the river’s brim at Catford Bridge? God bless you, ye innocent, there
are no forests but forests of chimneys at Forest Hill, and the rushes
of Rushey Green have long been replaced by macadam and York stone
pavements; and although, I doubt not, you can find primroses in their
season at Catford Bridge, they are only those that are sold by the
flower-girls outside the railway-station, at what they style, in their
Cockney twang, “one punny a morky barnch,” a phrase which has been
translated into English by the learned as meaning “one penny a market
bunch.”
Although the road onwards from Rushey Green becomes in a little
distance rural, or at the worst dotted only here and there sporadically
with new houses, there are marked signs that the fields and the
remaining hedgerows are doomed. Among these unmistakable portents is
the new railway-station of Bellingham, placed at the present time
lonely, in the midst of fields, near the solitary Bellingham Farm.
No railway company builds a large station for the express purpose of
serving one farmhouse, and this is simply another instance of that
intelligent anticipation of events for which railway companies are now
showing an unwonted aptitude. Time was when the companies would tardily
provide station accommodation ten years or so after the appearance of a
thronged suburb, and then only after being memorialised to do so; but a
different policy now rules: it is the policy suggested by the depleted
pocket.
If, however, the main road remains rural, things are far otherwise
over to the eastward, between this and Burnt Ash, where the octopus
arms of the Corbett Estate are spreading out and embracing the fields
in a deadly grip. The long lines of streets and roofs, ascending the
hillside, may be discerned from the highway, and it is abundantly
evident that London is making a sly flank march that way, into Kent.
The Corbett Estate is, it should be said, a building estate of cheap
houses, chiefly for working men, and is administered on “temperance”
lines, public-houses for the sale of drink being forbidden. Here,
then, we see the working of one of those many fads for the making
of a perfect community which distinguishes the present age. Here it
is a Community of the Pump that is aimed at; there a Garden City,
and elsewhere other nostrums are on trial, all directed towards the
hastening of the millennium. But the wheels of progress towards
perfection are not to be set rolling at anything above their normal
speed by even the best intentioned, armed with the most exceptional
opportunities, and this thirsty Sahara among suburbs irrigates itself
just the same, albeit with considerable trouble.
D—n his eyes, whoever tries
To rob a poor man of his beer,
in effect says the working man of the Corbett Estate, and, to show his
independence on those occasions when he journeys a weariful distance
across the boundary of this drinkless district in order to get his
supper beer, takes more than he ordinarily would, returning home a
discredit to the good people who want to dragoon him into an avoidance
of Bung and all his vats, in preparation for their new Heaven and new
Earth.
The net result, and one wholly unlooked for, is that this prohibition
policy has practically conferred an immense endowment upon the inns
of Rushey Green, which, once modest enough, have blossomed forth as
immense public-houses, doing a roaring trade with the unregenerate.
The road, coming to South End, comes really and truly to the end of
London and its suburbs, and is at present prettily rural. Only those
who know the district well are aware that, a short way off to the
right hand, there is a little Erebus at Bell Green, where the gasworks
are. If our old vituperative Cobbett were back again, taking his rural
rides, I have no doubt he would call the place Hell Green, and he would
not be altogether unjustified in doing so. But for my own part, I
prefer to dwell rather upon South End, and feel inclined to curse the
exploratory activity that led me to discover that awful place at the
back of the road; so abject, so unutterably vile.
South End owes much—almost everything, in fact—to the beneficent
Ravensbourne, which flows beside the road, and long ago was enlarged
into a lake at this point. It is a pretty lake, the prettier because
unexpected, and there are those who actually fish in it; not for the
lordly salmon, nor even for grayling or dace. No, it is rather the
humble “tiddler” who makes sport for the small boy with a twig, a
piece of cotton and a pickle-bottle; and I declare that no fisherman
in india-rubber waders, up to his thighs in the middle of a stream
and at grips with a salmon, experiences a wilder ardour than that of
these sportsmen of the neighbouring streets. I feel sorry, however, for
the tiddlers, thus slain in their thousands. They do not long survive
the water of the pickle-bottle, and presently, giving up the ghost,
collapse and develop those extraordinary spikinesses which, I suppose,
give them their proper name of “sticklebacks.”
VII
It is a long, long rise from South End to Bromley, which stands among
the breezy heights near Keston and Hayes. Half way up it there are
still traces of the deep dingle that gave the spot the name “Holloway,”
by which it was known to the road-books of the coaching age.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE WIDOWS’ COLLEGE.]
It was an ominous place, suitable for the footpad’s leap in the dark
upon the traveller’s back, and those wayfarers who were obliged to pad
the hoof alone through Holloway when night was come wished they had
eyes in the back of the head, in addition to the usual pair. Near by
stood, and still stands, Bromley Hill House, once the seat of Charles
Long, afterwards Lord Farnborough. In the dairy at that place one John
Clarke, gardener, murdered Elizabeth Mann, a dairy-maid, and over
against Holloway there was erected a gallows, and on it John Clarke,
brought in a cart from Maidstone gaol, in due time swung.
At the threshold of Bromley stands the College, not an educational
establishment, but a superior kind of almshouse, whose purpose is
explained by the inscription set up over the doorway:
Deo et Ecclesiæ
This College for Twenty poore
widowes (of orthodox and Loyall
Clergymen) & A Chaplin was
given by Iohn Warner late L^d.
Bishop of Rochester
1666
John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, was a staunch supporter of Church
and King, in times when both the Establishment and the Monarchy were
in a bad way. Charles the First was not wholly responsible for the
troubles and tragedies of his reign. An acrid Puritanism was in the
air, and had already manifested itself, very unpleasantly, in his
father’s time. It was the inevitable reaction from the Renaissance
gaieties under Elizabeth. The times were such that, even in the first
year of Charles the First’s rule, Warner found it necessary to deliver
a bitter sermon directed against the politico-religious activities of
the Puritans, based upon the text, Matt. xxi. 38: “This is the heir;
come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance.” No one had
in those early days of strife thought of beheading Charles, and we must
therefore count Warner among the prophets.
The bishop came very near being impeached before Parliament for this
exploit, and only escaped by the King stepping in and “pardoning” him
in advance of Parliamentary action.
It is not surprising to find that, when the troubles culminated in war,
the House was swift to sequestrate the bishop from his see, and even to
seize his property. They proved the innuendo of his discourse at his
own expense, he was forced to leave his palace at Bromley in disguise,
fearing for his personal safety at the hands of the saints, and for
years he wandered in poverty in the West Country. Like other survivors
of the dispossessed clergy, high-placed and low, he came to his own
again at the Restoration in 1661, but he was then an old man of eighty.
Five years later he was dead.
[Illustration: IN THE FIRST QUADRANGLE, WIDOWS’ COLLEGE, BROMLEY.]
A many-sided benefactor, he was not without his critics, who declared
him mean. He seems to have somewhat keenly felt the charge, for he
repelled it by remarking that he “did eat the scragg ends of the neck
of mutton, that he might leave the poor the shoulder.” We do not learn
whether those critics had the grace to be ashamed.
His College was a noble thought. He bequeathed £8,500 to establish it,
and left a perpetual rent-charge of £450 per annum, secured upon his
manor of Swayton, Lincolnshire, to provide pensions of £20 per annum
for each of its twenty destined inmates, who were to be poor widows of
clergymen, preferably, but not exclusively, of the see of Rochester.
The odd £50 was for the chaplain’s stipend.
The College stands within six acres of beautifully wooded grounds,
with lovely lawns and gardens, and is very thoroughly fenced off from
the clatter of the outside world by an ancient brick wall, tall and
thick. Through the wrought-iron gateway, dated 1666, flanked by piers
surmounted with sculptured mitres, glimpses of the front are caught
behind the blossoming horse-chestnuts.
The little houses surround the quadrangle, which has its lawn, its
covered walk, like an up-to-date and domesticated cloister, and its
climbing-plants twisting round the pillars of the Jacobean colonnade.
They are very desirable little houses, with basement kitchens, a quaint
little hall, a fine sitting-room, and, on the first and attic floors,
from two to four bedrooms. Those fortunate enough to secure such a
haven for life are fortunate indeed, and in this sheltered backwater
of existence often live to be centenarians. But probably no one would
resent being styled “poor” more than these collegians themselves.
Poverty is a matter of comparison, and many would be content to
“endure” it on terms of a dainty house, free of rent, repairs, and
taxes, with from £38 to £44 a year thrown in—for many later bequests
have rendered it possible to raise the pension to those sums. Moreover,
to qualify for admission, a “poor” widow has now to be already rich
enough to possess an income of at least £40, and probably most of them
have much more.
Bromley College is therefore a kind of a minor Hampton Court, and great
is the competition to win to it when a vacancy occurs. Well-dressed and
well cared for in every way, the collegians are not to be pitied.
The occasional artist who comes to sketch the buildings finds the place
delightful. There are pretty girls reading novels or presiding over
dainty tea-tables: there are poverty-stricken widows in lace-caps, silk
gowns, and gold chains—all well known stigmata of a plentiful lack of
pence—and there is sometimes good music from soft-toned pianos.
The chapel provided for by the good bishop was rebuilt, at a cost of
£6,000, in 1860, by the aid of subscriptions. The Jacobean building it
replaces is said to have been extremely ugly, but that is easily said
of anything already marked for destruction; and the ’60’s were scarce
sufficiently well-disposed towards architecture of that period to be
able to determine fairly what was ugly and that which was merely not
at that time fashionable in bricks and mortar.
There are now forty widows in the College, and a second quadrangle was
added and endowed about 1790, from funds provided jointly by William
Pearce, brother of Bishop Zachary Pearce, and Mrs. Bettinson.
There has been in the past a good deal of nepotism in the government
of the College, and father has succeeded son in the chaplaincy, often
held by greedy pluralists, and often thrown in as a kind of extra sop
for the vicar of Bromley. Things like these must surely vex the spirit
of that truly pious benefactor, who, when raised to be bishop, could
not endure to hold his many preferments, and accordingly resigned them,
much against the spirit of his age.
An even later addition to this institution was made in 1840, when
the “Sheppard College” was built in the grounds. It consists of five
houses, endowed with £44 each per annum, for the benefit of daughters
who have lived with and attended upon their mothers in the original
College.
VIII
Bromley, in the days when it was only a small thing, was in the diocese
of Rochester. It has long since been transferred to Canterbury, and
the manor that had belonged to the Bishops of Rochester ever since the
eighth century, when it was given to them by King Ethelbert, was sold
with the palace into private hands in 1845. Those who will may see the
exterior of it to this day, but it is not the palace that the Norman
Gundulf built, nor even that whence Bishop Warner escaped, for it was
several times rebuilt, lastly in 1775. The site of the once Holy Well
of St. Blaise, the woolcombers’ saint, formerly much resorted to for
its chalybeate waters, is still to be seen in the grounds.
There are pitfalls for the stranger on every road in the way of
pronouncing place-names. Bromley-by-Bow is (or was until recently, but
there is a constant flux in these things) “Brumley,” and accordingly
this should have the like sound; but you will not hear this Kentish
town so named. The natives will not change the “o” into “u.”
But aborigines are somewhat difficult to find here, for the Bromley
that was a little market town with two fairs a year and a weekly market
granted by Henry the Sixth is a thing of the buried past. Bromley is
now suburban. It has grown from the little place of 1801, with 2,700
inhabitants, to a populous town which in 1901 numbered 27,358.
Much of the old town has vanished, but it will never be like an
ordinary suburb that grew potatoes last year, and has within six months
grown streets of houses “fitted with electric light, hot and cold
water-supply, and drained in accordance with the latest improvements,”
thus to quote advertisements. The town, in common with other places,
has all those modern features, but it has also a surviving proportion
of ancient houses, and even when they are gone it will still have its
history. By virtue of that past it keeps to-day a larger air and a
greater disunity than it could command merely as the dormitory of City
men who leave early in the morning and return at night, and pay rent,
rates, and taxes, but can have little of the sense of belonging to the
place.
Bromley, precisely like an assertive person who has “got on” in the
world, signalised its recent expansion by acquiring a coat-of-arms;
but not the most magnificent parvenu would dare sport a display so
elaborate and comprehensive as that which alone would serve Bromley. In
the recondite terminology affected by heralds it is “quarterly, gules
and azure; on a fesse wavy argent three ravens volant proper between,
in the first quarter, two branches slipped of the third: in the second
a sun in splendour; in the third an escallop shell or; and in the
fourth a horse forcené, also argent: and for the crest, on a wreath of
the colours, upon two bars wavy azure and argent, an escallop shell, as
in the arms, between two branches of broom proper.”
It sounds like the description by a maniac of the contents of a
shop-window, set up by a compositor who had misplaced the punctuation;
but it is clear and pellucid reading to a herald. At any rate, there
is no difficulty in discovering what it all means, for the device is
proudly and abundantly displayed in Bromley itself.
These many charges are not without their significance. The escallop
shell is in allusion to the time when the palace of the Bishops of
Rochester was situated here; the broom refers to the _planta genista_,
the broom that gave, in the long ago, its name to Bromley, and still
flourishes in the district; the sun in splendour indicates Sundridge,
whose name itself by no means alludes to the sun; and the white horse
is, of course, the familiar unconquered horse of Kent. The ravens
recall the legendary history of the Ravensbourne. Beneath all this
display is a Latin motto, to the effect that “While I grow I hope.”
Gravely aloof from all these things, the old parish church of Bromley
stands indeed in the centre of the town, but in a quiet lane leading
to a pretty little public garden on the edge of a height overlooking
all South London and its sea of roof-tops. It need scarcely be said
that the long body and the apocalyptic towers of the Crystal Palace
are prominent in the view. They brood like an obsession over all the
southern suburbs.
The exterior of the church looks very venerable and rustic, and has
even been improved by a tasteful new chancel built in recent times. In
the churchyard, built into the south wall, is a small and modest tablet
inscribed:
Here lyeth interred ye body of Martine French of this parish, with
four of his wives and two daughters. He departed this life 12 January
anno 1661, being aged 61, and his last wife died ye 13th of ye same
month, leaving behind him one sonne Martine and two daughters, Sarah
and Mary.
But Martin French is a very minor person beside the neighbouring
ELIZABETH MONK
who departed this Life on the 27^{th} Day of August 1753
Aged 101
She was the Widow of John Monk late of this Parish,
Blacksmith,
her second Husband,
To whom she had been a Wife near 50 Years:
By whom she had no Children:
And of the Issue of her first Marriage none lived to the second.
But VIRTUE
would not suffer her to be childless:
An infant to whom and to whose Father & Mother she had
been Nurse
(such is the uncertainty of temporal Prosperity)
became dependent upon Strangers for the Necessaries of Life.
To him she afforded the Protection of a Mother.
This parental Charity was returned with filial Affection:
And she was supported in the feebleness of Age
By him whom she had cherished in the Helplessnesss of Infancy.
_Let it be Rememb’red_
That there is no Station in which Industry will not obtain
Power to be Liberal:
Nor any Character on which Liberality will not
Confer Honour.
She had been long prepared by a simple and unaffected Piety
for that awful Moment, which however delayed
is universally sure.
How few are allowed an equal Time of Probation:
How many by their Lives appear to presume upon more:
To preserve the Memory of this Person,
but yet more to perpetuate the Lesson of her Life,
This Stone was erected by voluntary Contribution.
For lavish use of capital letters, adjectives, and copybook sentiments
this would be difficult to beat.
IX
The interior of the church is injured by the galleries built round
it, to accommodate a crowded congregation, and is otherwise of little
interest; the tombs of the Bishops of Rochester consisting merely of
a mangled relic of that supposed to be for Richard de Wendover, who
died in 1350, and the slab and the tablet, respectively, to John Yonge,
1605, and Zachary Pearce, 1774.
But in the pavement near the font, covered with a mat, is the
ledger-stone marking the resting-place of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s wife,
who died in 1753. It bears, of course, a Latin epitaph, for that great
literary giant of the eighteenth century was violently of opinion
that the English language was no fitting medium for the conveyance
of monumental honours. His arguments in support of that opinion are
unfortunately not recorded. They would doubtless be amusing, but it
would require a very robust argument to convince most people that an
inscription in a foreign language, and that a dead one, not to be
understood except by the comparatively few who are well versed in it,
is the best vehicle for the purpose. There seems, however, to have
been in Johnson’s time, and before, and for some while after it, an
odd feeling that the mother-tongue of the Englishman was, applied
to monuments, vulgar. To be classic, even at the risk of not being
understood, was the only resort of those who at all risks desired
to dissociate themselves from the vulgar herd. Johnson shared this
feeling to the full, and thus the epitaph to his “Tetty” is couched in
the language that Cæsar spoke. It extols the charms of her person and
manners, and thus gives point to Macaulay’s description of Johnson’s
singular infatuation for a woman twenty-one years older than himself.
“Every eye makes its own beauty,” truly says the old proverb, and here
is an instance. It was in 1736, when he was twenty-seven years of age,
that Johnson met the widowed Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, fell in love with
her, and married her. She was then forty-eight, and had children as old
as himself. Macaulay, in his broad, expressive, rather cruel way, says:
“To ordinary spectators the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse
woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond
of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those
of the Queensberrys and Lepels.” She was, continues Macaulay, “a silly,
vain old woman. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, and
whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish cerise from natural bloom,
his Tetty was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her
sex. That his admiration of her was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for
she was as poor as himself.”
There are many tablets on the walls of this much-galleried building:
one to a Mr. Thomas Chase, of the Rookery, who was nearly swallowed up
by the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755. He seems to have been born
there in 1729, and after his nerve-shaking experience to have removed
to this country. He died in 1788, aged fifty-nine.
One harrowing inscription meets the eye on leaving the building. It
tells how, on Saturday, September 10th, 1904, a peal of grandsire
triples of 5,040 changes was rung upon the bells. They took 3 hours
6 minutes, and then quiet came to the suffering town. Bromley has my
respectful sympathy.
X
The way through Bromley is not straight and it is not broad. This is so
much of a truism at Bromley that the statement is calculated to make
its inhabitants smile indulgently, as do those good-natured people
who are told what they already know. The early nineteenth-century
roadmakers strove to remedy these defects, and did what they could
to widen and straighten the way, and incidentally to abolish the
picturesqueness of the place; but those “vested interests” that are
a part of every civilisation forbade much alteration, and the road
still trickles and meanders through the town and divides into two
channels and unites again, like some sluggish, undecided river. It
is an infirmity of purpose that can be carried back to a very remote
origin: to the time, in fact, when Bromley was only beginning to be a
settlement amid the then widespreading wastes; when the prehistoric
tribesmen drove their herds across the broomy heaths to water at the
Ravensbourne, and tracked deviously to avoid boulders, trees, or boggy
places. These were the circumstances that fixed throughout the ages
the windings of Bromley’s streets. One somewhat important change was,
however, made under the Improvement Act of 1830. A new road was cut
to one side of the Market Place, starting just beyond the “Bell” and
ending just short of the “White Hart.”
The historian seeking something of the old coaching days at Bromley
pities himself. He finds the “Swan” very gay and attractive in summer
with displays of geraniums, calceolarias, and lobelia, but he does not
find the old house, and when he has found the “Bell,” in the centre of
the town, he has come to a very beautiful building; but it is modern.
The alleged fact that its doorway is on a level with the cross of
St. Paul’s Cathedral does not seem to have the significance it would
possess were the old house standing.
The old inn is the subject of a slight reference in Jane Austen’s
“Pride and Prejudice,” where she makes Lady Catherine say: “Where shall
you change horses? Oh, Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at
the ‘Bell’ you will be attended to.” The passage does not make my
pulses leap.
Only the “White Hart” remains; appropriately enough white-faced, cool
and clean-looking, with the white hart himself “couchant regardant,
collared or,” as a herald might say, over the portico. Unhappily,
gigantic modern red-brick buildings encompass the inn, rising to four
times the height of it, and presently the old house itself will
inevitably go.
Beyond this point is South Bromley, where the railway runs and modern
expansion is most evident. You descend to it, and having descended
immediately ascend again, up the not very Andean slope of Mason’s Hill.
At the time these lines are being written Mason’s Hill still remains
old-fashioned. A few of its dignified Queen Anne mansions, standing
with an old-world detachment behind their palisade of formal iron
railings, are left; but they are to be sold for clearance and
rebuilding, and so also are a group of ancient dormer-windowed
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses of a humbler type. They
have all the added importance that comes from being situated above a
footpath which itself is in places raised more than head and shoulders
above the road for wheeled traffic. Old wooden railings protect
children, boozy wayfarers, and sheer wool-gathering, star-gazing folk
from falling off the pavement into the hollow road.
[Illustration: THE ROAD ACROSS BROMLEY COMMON.]
Having wriggled its way through Bromley and climbed Mason’s Hill, the
Hastings Road sets out across Bromley Common, broad and straight and
forceful, in a splendid forthright manner, about its ultimate business
of getting to the coast. Most other roads show plentiful evidences
of having, like Topsy, grown; but this, you can see at a glance, was
obviously made. It occupies a ridge. Villas front upon it on leaving
the town behind: villas of every type since such things began to be,
and a leisurely walk past them is therefore something in the nature of
a generous education in the varying ideals in domestic architecture
since the days of the Regency.
But presently these are all left behind, and the fields on either side
of this modern road with an ancient Roman inflexibility are broken
only by the house and grounds of that most beautiful and noble early
eighteenth-century mansion, the Rookery, built of the most exquisite
red brick.
The Rookery belongs to a time before this fine road came into being:
to that time when travellers came painfully up the hill to that open
common much dwelt upon by old county historians. Opposite the mansion
in those days stood the two polled elms known from time immemorial as
Great and Little Beggars’ Bush, and known most unfavourably, for in the
shade cast by them at night not merely beggars, but those highwaymen of
the meaner sort called footpads, lurked.
Time has a sardonic trick of turning the matter-of-fact descriptions of
the old topographers into absurdly misleading statements. Thus, reading
Lysons’ description of Bromley, written in 1796, we smile at his
remarks that “the Anglo-Saxon _Brom-leag_ signifies a field, or heath,
where broom grows,” and that “the great quantity of that plant on all
the waste places near the town fully justifies this etymology.”
Bromley Common was in great part enclosed soon after the middle of
the eighteenth century, and most of the remaining two hundred and
fifty acres were cut up and partitioned in 1822, amid much local
satisfaction. With it went the broom near the town; although, to be
sure, it is still plentifully to be found on the further commons
towards Keston.
A piece of beautiful common-land through which the road runs at the
extremity of the parish is still called “Bromley Common.” Down below
it, in a hollow, is Lock’s Bottom, a hamlet whose pretty scenery
is rather vainly endeavouring to bear up, under the infliction of
some commonplace houses and a prominent police-station. There are
picturesque alders in front of the “White Lion,” but the blue lamp
of the police-station spoils the sentiment of it all. Why, you ask
yourself, _that_ in a place by way of being so pretty and so rural?
A few steps onward give the answer, in the great workhouse and the
casual-ward, and the expectant tramps reclining, more pictorially than
they know, by the pond under the tall fir-trees opposite.
XI
The road in the neighbourhood of Lock’s Bottom seems, in the old days,
to have been particularly dangerous. It ran, in the middle of the
seventeenth century and for long afterwards, through a wide district of
unenclosed common-land, and was just one of those lonely highways where
the footpads and highwaymen had matters very much their own way.
An unpleasant adventure of this sort happened just here, beside a
vanished landmark once known to wayfarers as the “Procession Oak,” to
John Evelyn, the diarist, on May 23rd, 1652.
Leaving his wife to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells, he set out on
horseback for London. In his “Diary” we learn what befell him on the
way:
“The weather being hot, and having sent my man on before me, I rode
negligently under favour of the shade till within three miles of
Bromley. At a place call’d the Procession Oake, two cut-throates
started out, and striking with long staves at the horse and taking
hold of the reines, threw me downe, took my sword, and haled me into
a deepe thickett some quarter of a mile from the highway, where they
might securely rob me, as they soone did. What they got of money was
not considerable, but they took two rings, the one an emerald with
diamonds, the other an onyx, and a pair of bouckles set with rubies and
diamonds, which were of value, and, after all, bound my hands behind
me, and my feete, having before pull’d off my bootes; they then set
me up against an oake, with most bloudy threats to cutt my throat if
I offer’d to crie out or make any noise, for they should be within
hearing, I not being the person they looked for. I told them, if they
had not basely surpriz’d me, they should not have had so easy a prize,
and that it would teach me never to ride neere an hedge, since had I
been in the mid-way they durst not have adventur’d on me; at which
they cock’d their pistols, and told me they had long guns too, and
were fourteen companions. I begg’d for my onyx, and told them it being
engraven with my armes would betray them, but nothing prevail’d. My
horse’s bridle they slipt, and search’d the saddle, which they pull’d
off, but let the horse graze, and then, turning againe, bridled him and
tied him to a tree, yet so as he might graze, and thus left me bound.
My horse was perhaps not taken because he was mark’d and cropt on both
eares, and well known on that roade.
“Left in this manner, grievously was I tormented with flies, ants, and
the sunn, nor was my anxiety little how I should get loose in that
solitary place, where I could neither heare nor see any creature but my
poore horse and a few sheepe stragling in the copse. After neere two
houres attempting, I got my hands to turn palm to palm, having been
tied back to back, and then it was long before I could slip the cord
over my wrists to my thumb, which at last I did, and then soone unbound
my feete, and saddling my horse and roaming awhile about, I at last
perceiv’d dust to rise, and soone after heard the rattling of a cart,
towards which I made, and by the help of two country men I got back
into the high way.
“I rode to Coll. Blount’s, a greate justiciarie of the times, who
sent out hue and cry immediately. The next morning, sore as my wrists
and armes were, I went to London and got 500 tickets printed and
dispers’d by an officer of Goldsmiths Hall, and within two daies had
tidings of all I had lost, except my sword, which had a silver hilt,
and some trifles. The rogues had pawn’d one of my rings for a trifle
to a goldsmith’s servant, before the tickets had come to the shop, by
which meanes they scap’d; the other ring was bought by a victualler,
who brought it to a goldsmith, but be, having seen the ticket, seiz’d
the man. I afterwards discharg’d him, on his protestation of innocence.
Thus,” he concludes, “did God deliver me from these villains, and
not onely so, but restor’d what they tooke, as twice before He had
graciously don, both at sea and land ... for which, and many, many
signal preservations, I am extreamely oblig’d to give thanks to God my
Saviour.”
This incident of impudent highway robbery in midday sufficiently
illustrates the general insecurity of the times and the risks that
travellers ran.
But let it not be thought that all highwaymen were brutal and lacking
in bowels of compassion. We know, from the stirring annals of Hounslow
Heath, that a Duval could act a courtly part when a lady was in the
case; and here records tell of a very perfect, gentle knight of the
road, who could be polite and considerate even to one of his own sex.
But hear what the London newspapers of 1773 said: “Last night Mr.
Delves, whalebone merchant, being taken ill at Hayes in Kent, and
coming to town in a postchaise, was stopped by a highwayman, who robbed
him of his money; but finding him greatly indisposed and not able to
help himself, civilly wrapped him up warm, wished him better health and
a good evening, gave the postboy a shilling, and ordered him to drive
gently on.” We do not find that he returned the money. He doubtless
thought it enough to rob with civility and to wish the invalid well
again.
XII
Beyond this, one comes in a mile to the casual, disjointed, and
scattered collection of houses called Farnborough, once a spruce and
busy “thoroughfare” hamlet in the days of coaching: now a rather seedy
place of resident market-gardeners and tramping hop-pickers. The old
“George and Dragon” inn, that in the Queen Annean sort faces you on
approach and, as it were, plants its considerable bulk half-way into
the road, as though to dare your passing, has been furbished up in the
public-house kind, and without difficulty stops the passage of most. It
has a portico with pillars painted and grained to resemble real marble;
but the veins are too preposterous, and the much more real compo
underneath peeps out, like the obvious advertisement in a badly written
puff.
If I were an amateur of ugly houses—which the Lord forbid—I would turn
to the right-hand here and make for Downe, which is two miles distant.
For there, by the pond of that pretty village, stands the hideous
mansion in which Darwin lived, and where, in 1882, he died of a chill
caught in prowling at night on the lawn with a dark lantern, studying
earthworms. A carpenter near by preserves the coffin, with inscription
all complete, in which the great naturalist was to have been laid (but
for some reason was not), and strangely morbid people, with gruesome
ideas of sight-seeing, go numerously to see it.
Keeping, however, to the main road and on to Green Street Green, we
cannot altogether avoid the ugly, which appears, very large and brutal,
in the Oak Brewery. I am told it is a famous brewing firm, but one
willingly forgets their name, and only knows that their buildings are
ugly and sooty, and look dry and make one feel thirsty. Perhaps there
is more in that than meets the eye.
Green Street Green really _has_ a green: a thing which in a world where
New College, Oxford, and the numerous Newports throughout the country
are among the oldest of institutions and places, and where villages
with the prefix “Great” are almost inevitably among the smallest, was
by no means to be counted upon as a certainty. And not only has Green
Street Green a green, but it is rather a large and a not unbeautiful
specimen. But perhaps its most striking feature is the extraordinary
number of old City of London cast-iron posts, indicating the boundaries
of the old Coal and Wine Dues area. It seems as though the City, having
delimited those bounds in a fifteen-miles radius from London, and come
at last, full circle, to Green Street Green, found itself with a
surplus stock of posts, and so set them up here, rather than be at the
trouble of taking them home again.
It was somewhere near here that, about 1783, a malefactor who had
robbed the mail was hanged in chains, upon the scene of his crime. A
house was formerly pointed out, with a window bricked up at that time
in order to shut out the view of the blackened body of the robber
swinging and circling on his gibbet.
Pratt’s Bottom, the next of the hamlets strung so numerously, like
beads, upon this portion of the Hastings Road, is a mile and a half
ahead.
It was here, on the night of August 27th, 1841, that the down Hastings
Mail met with the first of the two misadventures that befell it on
this occasion. The coach had passed through the toll-gate that then
stood here, and was going at about eight miles an hour, when it ran
over an old woman seated in the middle of the road, helplessly drunk.
The apparent truth of the old saying that Providence especially looks
after fools, drunkards, and children lost none of its point here, for
the coach and horses, in some marvellous way, passed over her without
doing her any injury except a slight bruise on the forehead, supposed
to have been caused by the drag-chain. By some almost miraculous
interposition, the horses seem to have dashed past on either side of
her. The coach was stopped, and the passengers and guard, naturally
thinking her days were ended by her being run over or kicked to death,
got nervously down to remove what they thought was at least a dying, if
not an already dead, creature, when they were assailed by a vigorous
torrent of abuse. Somewhat relieved by this evidence that she could
not be very seriously hurt, they picked her up, and, as she was much
too drunk to walk, placed her on the grass by the roadside, out of the
way of the traffic. Then the coach started again; but they had not
gone beyond two miles when, through the clear air of a very beautiful
night, the coachman saw a number of waggons ahead, approaching. He
called to the guard to blow his horn, which the guard accordingly did,
when the waggons drew off to one side. Unfortunately they were drawn
to their off-side, directly into the path of the on-coming mail, which
dashed into Barnett’s Tunbridge van, at the head of them. The van was
hurled violently into the hedge, and the coach, going off at an angle
from this terrific impact, then went full tilt into a hay-wain. The
splinter-bar ran under the shafts of the wain and so, happily for the
passengers, kept the coach from crashing over; but the shock of the
encounter flung the coachman from his seat and the wheels went over
his body. He rolled over and moaned piteously, but never spoke again.
Carried into the “Polhill Arms,” he shortly expired there.
Rough-and-ready roadside repairs were effected and the coach went on to
Riverhead, but the passengers, thoroughly unnerved by the chances and
disasters of this ominous night, preferred to walk on to that village,
three miles and a half away, where, at the “White Hart,” they rested.
The surviving toll-house at Pratt’s Bottom is neighboured by a signpost
which directs to Knockholt, to Sevenoaks, to Chelsfield, and—to the
Workhouse: _i.e._ the workhouse we have just passed at Lock’s Bottom.
That way also leads to London, but that is merely an incidental matter.
[Illustration: THE OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PRATT’S BOTTOM.]
The gently swelling hills at this point are composed of a stratum of
pebbles, mixed with a proportion of flints: the product of vastly
remote geological ages. These pebbles have given its Saxon name to
the neighbouring village of Chelsfield, which is Cealch-field or
Chesilfield = the field of pebbles; just as the not far distant
Chelsham and Chiselhurst, with similar pebbles, are, in the same way,
Pebble Home and Pebble Wood.
XIII
At Pratt’s Bottom there is an interesting parting of the ways. The
straight road on to Sevenoaks, by way of Polhill, is modern, having
been made in 1836. Before that time the route lay up along by the
dangerously acute turning to the right, where the old toll-house
stands, to the weary ascent of Rushmore, or Richmore Hill, and to
Knockholt Pound. Ogilby, in his “Britannia” of 1675 shows a map of this
road to “Nokeholt,” as he calls it, with “Ye Porcupine inne” on the
right-hand, near the summit; and a “Porcupine” inn is there to this day.
At the foot of the rise stands the “Bull’s Head” inn, itself of a
considerable age, picturesquely faced by a row of old elms, and just
beyond you may notice in the hollow on the right hand, where the
modern schools stand, an unreformed piece of the original old road,
going very steeply and stonily in a loop, and rejoining the present
route a quarter of a mile onwards. A white house, now a farmhouse,
just before reaching the “Porcupine,” is still sometimes called by the
older rustics “New Stables.” It was a posting-house in the old days. At
Knockholt, where, having reached the topmost eyrie of the downs, the
road turns left, the “Harrow” inn, that was once the house of call for
the carriers and waggoners of the Sevenoaks road, still stands.
When the chronicler of these things has explored the old way to
Sevenoaks and the new it remains more than ever a mystery why this
circuitous way was ever followed, and why so many generations of
travellers should have been content to continue along it when a
considerable distance might have been saved, a less arduous climb
encountered, and a much less dangerous descent made by following the
line of country now covered by the modern road.
At Knockholt one has come to a very bleak and inhospitable place, as
may be seen by that famous landmark, Knockholt Beeches, not far from
the ancient route. The Beeches, it is well known, are situated on the
loftiest view-point of the North Downs, and form as windy an outlook as
it is possible to conceive; but in those days travellers did not travel
for the sake of the views on the way.
[Illustration: KNOCKHOLT BEECHES.]
It is _de rigueur_ among the circles that frequent the site of the
Beeches to call it “Knock’olt.” To pronounce the name in any other way
would seem to them the sheerest affectation. The spot is, in fact,
dedicated by common consent to the beanfeaster on week-days and to the
sporting publican on Sundays, who drives his best barmaid out in a
flashy trap, and has lunch at the neighbouring inn, known to the vulgar
herd as the “Crahn.” Whether it be due to the strong liquors of the
“Crown” or to the bracing quality of the breezes I do not know, but the
sheer abandonment of the merry-making at the Beeches can excel even
that of the ’Eath on a Bank Holiday. “The ’Eath?” you ask. Why, yes;
there is only one possible ’Eath in this connection—that of ’Ampstead.
[Illustration: A PHYLLIS OF KNOCKHOLT.]
From Knockholt Beeches the eye ranges to the Crystal Palace, the
enormity of it a little excused by distance; and the Tower Bridge and
the dome of St. Paul’s are easily to be identified. But those familiar
objects soon pall, and the yearnful music of the concertina and the
mazy dance commonly occupy the all-too-swiftly fading afternoon. ’Arry
and ’Arriet exchange hats in the spirit of fellowship that has come
down to them from the remote ages when semi-savage ancestors swapped
headgear at their feasts to typify equality one with the other;
although I suspect that if you told ’Arry and his “donah” that they
do what they do because their ancient ancestors were accustomed to
do it, they would promptly tell you to “shut it, guv’nor.” And they
would properly be resentful, for every one prefers to think “I am I,”
self-actuated, automobilous, self-contained, and patterned on no model.
And at last, arms round waists, ’Arriet crowned with a bowler, and
’Arry’s cheeks swept by the “ostridge” feathers of her hat, they go
back in the solemn twilight to the waggonettes, singing the latest
songs of the Halls.
But to resume the old road, interrupted too long by this interlude.
A stark, forbidding plateau of swede and mangold-wurtzel fields follows
from the hamlet of Knockholt Pound, through which the road runs,
unfenced, like a footpath. Then it plunges, with little warning, down
the southern face of the hills and goes hazardously corkscrewing to the
levels, far below. Down there, on the right hand, through the hedges,
is Chevening, and you look down, like the rooks and crows, upon the
roofs of church and mansion, situated, as Mr. Thomas Hardy would say,
in his sesquipedalian fashion, “as in an isometric drawing.”
This, indeed, is the well-known “Madamscourt” Hill, so styled from
time immemorial, although the name derives from the estate of Morant’s
Court, at the foot. There is, at any rate, no lady in _this_ case, and
the direction, _cherchez la femme_, is entirely out of order.
The cyclist passes in a flash a large white house on the left hand,
half-way down, and is too engrossed upon the problem of whether he will
succeed in reaching the bottom safely to notice it. The house, now a
villa, was in the old days of the road a very fine inn, called the
“Star,” and from it the hill is still known to many of the country-folk
as “Star Hill.” The exceeding steepness of the hill gave the “Star”
the excellent custom it enjoyed until the way was diverted, and thus
abolished the jolly days of the old road.
The coaches wagged so slowly to the summit that the passengers commonly
walked quicker to the hill-top, and were already enjoying the very
choice fare provided when the weary team pulled up at the door. The
horses had, of course, to be rested, and as no one in those hospitable
days could think of not offering coachman and guard some liquid token
of their esteem, it was often a considerable time before the journey
was resumed.
Just below the old inn the “Pilgrim’s Way” from Winchester to
Canterbury crossed the road, making for Otford, along the sunny
southern slopes of the downs.
At last, gaining the level, the old coach-road joins the modern route
at the “Rose and Crown,” Dunton Green.
XIV
The present road to Sevenoaks from Pratt’s Bottom is closely
neighboured by the South Eastern Railway, running in a deep chalk
cutting and then disappearing in the grim mouth of Polhill Tunnel,
one and-a-half mile long. The mephitic breath of the tunnel, bellying
sulphureously out and flying in noisome wisps over the road, would be
a good converting agent for those who, believing in eternal punishment
and the Pit, have not yet ordered their lives accordingly; and you
who look down there think it rather surprising that railways with
dreadful tunnels have not yet been pressed into missionary service
by those who will not renounce the traditional Hell of sulphur and
fire. Believers, convey your awful examples hither. Bring them to a
belief in an Eternity of _that_, only hotter, and you shall have them
instantaneously on their knees, earnestly making resolutions to turn
from their wickedness, and live.
A station, now called “Knockholt,” is planted here. It was formerly
styled “Halstead,” from the village of that name, half a mile away;
but, to avoid any possibility of confusion with another Halstead, in
Essex, it was given this name, although Knockholt is nearly three miles
distant.
The felled trees, wooden shanties, and sawmills here beside the road,
at May’s Farm, give the place rather the air of some scene of backwoods
activity in America.
From here the road gradually rises to the crest of Polhill, on the
commanding range of the North Downs. The “Polhill Arms,” standing on
the left hand, marks the beginning of the long descent into the Weald,
very thoroughly masked and the magnificent view down to Sevenoaks
hidden by a dense screen of beeches and firs. Something else is masked
by those trees: a great modern fort, with emplacements for heavy guns,
built up here for the defence of London, as part of a scheme comprising
some sixteen forts forming an irregular circle around the metropolis at
a radius of about twenty miles, and designed to check a sudden descent
of any possible enemy upon the capital.
London has been held by military experts to be peculiarly open to such
a danger; hence the forts of Polhill, Farningham, Dartford, Merstham,
Box Hill, Pewley Hill, Esher, and others. But Englishmen, official or
otherwise, are so used to considering the likelihood of invasion remote
that, although many of the sites for forts have been purchased, it has
been found impracticable to obtain sufficient money from Parliament
to complete the ring and to thoroughly fortify these approaches.
Parliament looks with suspicion upon Service proposals, and since
the scandals of the great Boer War those suspicions have been very
generally shared by the nation at large, which looks upon the methods
of the War Office as those of a war office in comic opera.
It is a tawny-coloured roadway that swoops down from the summit of
Polhill, between the sandy banks of a wooded cutting, to Dunton Green.
Half-way down, the trees and the cutting give place to open country,
and the hill itself goes by another name: that of Sepham Hill.
Down by Dunton Green, looking backwards, the hills, those noble North
Downs, are seen to go terracing away beautifully east and west, their
great, green, rounded shoulders dimpled with folds and gullies, shaggy
here and there with belts of trees, or scarred outrageously with great
gashes of chalk-pits, where the lime-burners every day demolish yet
another fragment of picturesque scenery and roast it in limekilns, to
the end that it may go towards the making of mortar and mean streets.
There goes Old England, in mortar, to feed the spreading tentacles of
the towns.
Just such a chalk-pit is that huge scar, beside the hill we have just
descended, where who shall say how many tons are excavated weekly?
What would Ruskin have said of it? Something superlative, without
doubt. I think I hear him: “accursed,” “damnable,” he says, and Dr.
Samuel Johnson, in the spirit-world, discussing the question with him,
decides magisterially, after his wont: “The point is, sir, whether you
are to use the materials Nature has given us for the improvement of
man’s condition in the world, or to neglect them in order to preserve
the savage wastes of a desolate country-side, to gratify the diseased
fancies of people who call themselves artists. Sir, let us take a walk
down the Elysian equivalent of Fleet Street!”
[Illustration: AN OLD WAYSIDE COTTAGE, BELOW POLHILL.]
Dunton Green, formerly Donington, is a rather Cockneyfied hamlet
that is at present halting between expansion and a few regretful
reminiscences of a past rural state. It is very populous, and the
children live and have their playground in the open road.
[Illustration: LONGFORD.]
At Longford, to which we come after Dunton Green, the river Darenth
is crossed, at an early stage of its career, by a bridge that long
ago superseded the ford. It is still a narrow bridge, with a roadway
only twenty feet wide, but it has been already once widened and once
renewed, as two tablets, built into the wall on either side, declare:
This Bridge was renewed by order of the Commissioners of Sevenoakes
Turnpike. William Covell, Mason.
And
This Bridge was Widen’d in March a.d. 1813 by order of the Seven Oaks
Turnpike Road. J. Smith, Archt.
The Darenth rises at Westerham, only five miles away; but there is
already a sufficient head of water in the infant stream to serve the
purpose of a large flour-mill standing here.
Beyond it, a dusty stretch leads into Riverhead, past a strange little
outlying group of houses lying back from the road and fronted with
the rows of lime-trees that give it the name of Linden Square. Local
gossip declares the place to have once been a coaching inn, but exact
information is utterly unprocurable.
XV
That the village of Riverhead belongs very largely to Lord Amherst is
obvious enough, in the highly ornate terra-cotta tablets on the houses,
bearing a gigantic A crowned with an earl’s coronet and ensigned with
a shield charged with three spears. Also the “Amherst Arms,” with its
sign exhibiting two Red Indians and the motto, “Constantia et Virtute,”
proclaims the lordship.
Riverhead is a pretty little village, with a puzzling number of
branching roads, situated at the foot of the long steep rises to
Sevenoaks. Its name comes from the source of the Darenth being near at
hand. The church that looks so picturesque in the illustration is, in
fact, a piece of very bad early nineteenth-century Gothic, designed
and built in 1831 by Decimus Burton, whose sympathies were entirely
with the classic styles, as will be acknowledged when it is said that
he it was who designed the Arch and screen at Hyde Park Corner and the
lodges at the various gates of Hyde Park.
The corner of Riverhead selected for illustration here includes old and
new. The gabled houses on the left are recent; the weathered wall on
the right, with the curious little two-spouted fountain, is old; and
very old and weather-worn is the almost entirely illegible notice-board
declaring that something will be done to somebody doing something or
other, followed by “£5.” It is very vague and terrifying.
“Montreal,” a beautiful park on the right hand of the ascent to
Sevenoaks, is an historic place, the seat of Lord Amherst (Earl
Amherst and Baron Holmesdale), descendant of that great soldier
of the eighteenth century, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Field-Marshal and
Commander-in-Chief.
The estate of Montreal came to this family in the seventeenth century,
when a Jeffrey Amherst of that period, a barrister, acquired it. The
place, then called “Brooks,” had been a seat of the ancient Colepepper
family. The famous soldier was born here, and it is not a little
curious to observe that his equally great contemporary, Wolfe, whose
most renowned exploits were performed in the same series of campaigns
in Canada, was born close at hand, at Westerham.
Amherst was born in 1717, and commenced his career as page to the first
Duke of Dorset at Knole, afterwards learning the profession of arms in
Germany, then, as now, the military school _par excellence_. How he
fought in the victory of Dettingen or in the defeat of Fontenoy does
not concern us here. His chance came when Pitt, alarmed at the policy
of the French in Canada, gave him high command in those territories;
and he justified the selection.
[Illustration: RIVERHEAD.]
He was no kid-glove warrior. Sentiment was no portion of his equipment
in the field, and if there were any in his composition he reserved it
until his campaigns were fought to a finish.
To some of his doings or proposals the term “methods of barbarism,”
shamefully applied by Little Englanders to the rosewater conduct of
our modern campaigns in South Africa, might well have been attached.
In warfare with the Indians he was so enraged with the atrocities
committed by them upon captured officers that he contemplated employing
bloodhounds and spreading smallpox among the redskins. That last horror
was, fortunately, sternly vetoed, not only for the sake of humanity,
but from the very reasonable fear that the scourge, once let loose,
might destroy not merely the “noble red man,” but the white man as well.
Probably no one fully informed ever applied to Amherst the term of
“dashing.” His methods as a general were calculating and deliberate;
he was, indeed, the very antithesis of the meteoric, impulsive Wolfe.
Those qualities served his country quite as well, and himself better;
for although he was not idolised as a hero, he succeeded, on his return
home, in obtaining the post of Commander-in-Chief.
To be regarded as a hero, it is generally considered necessary to be
killed in the performance of the heroic deed, which does not seem
altogether satisfactory, and is indeed rather discouraging.
However that may be, a grateful country, in the person of George the
Third, eventually offered Amherst an earldom. He refused it, and
accepted a barony instead. He held the post of Commander-in-Chief for
many years, and only resigned, under pressure, in 1795 in favour of the
Duke of York, the king’s son, whose military exploits are summed up in
the once-popular lines:
The brave old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men:
He marched them up to the top of a hill,
And marched them down again;
a specimen of minstrelsy which concludes with the obvious statements
that—
When they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were half-way up
They were neither up nor down.
Amherst lived but two years after the close of his public career, dying
in 1797, at the age of eighty-one.
He it was who, demolishing the old house at Riverhead, built the
present exceedingly plain stone mansion, and re-named house and park
“Montreal.” There was, in fact, something in the scenery around
Sevenoaks that reminded him vividly of those great northern pine-clad
territories of America, where he had warred with such distinction
against the French and the redskins; and there is a spot on the road
from Sevenoaks to Ightham, where the red-stemmed pines grow thick and
a mysterious woodland hush enshrouds the place, so keenly reminiscent
of the scene of his action at Crown Point in 1759, that he rechristened
it by that name. The spot—in the woodlands of Seal Chart—may readily
be found to-day, for it is marked by the Crown Point inn, whose sign,
the “Sir Jeffrey Amherst,” exhibiting a picture of the warrior himself
brooding over the scene of his exploit, depends picturesquely from a
tree-trunk.
A tall obelisk, built rather precariously of rubble, stands on a
rabbit-infested mound in the park of “Montreal,” in a vista opening
from the house, and is itself surrounded by weird pine-trees. It bears
long inscriptions reviewing those military operations. One side is
dedicated to a “most able statesman” (by whom William Pitt, Earl of
Chatham, is indicated), and another commemorates the meeting here of
Amherst with his two younger brothers—John, Admiral of the Blue, and
William, Lieutenant-General.
It was an era when England was fighting all the world, and had need of
such commanders.
The long list of military successes is stupendous:
Dedicated
to that most able
Statesman
during whose Administration
Cape Breton and Canada were conquered,
and from whose Influence
the British Arms derived
a Degree of Lustre
unparallell’d in past Ages.
Fort Levi surrendered 25^{th} August 1760
Isle au Noix abandoned 28^{th} August 1760
Montreal surrendered
and with it all Canada and
Ten French Battalions lay’d
down their Arms 8^{th} Sept. 1760
S^t. John’s, Newfoundland
retaken 18^{th} Sept. 1762.
Louisbourg surrendered
and Six French Battalions
Prisoners of War, 26^{th} July 1758
Port du Quesne taken possession of 24^{th} Nov. 1758
Niagara surrendered 25^{th} July 1759
Tonderoga[2] taken possession of 26^{th} July 1759
Crown Point taken possession of 4^{th} August 1759
Quebec capitulated 18^{th} Sept. 1759.
To commemorate
the providential and happy meeting
of three Brothers
on this, their Paternal Ground
on the 25^{th} January 1764
after a six Years glorious War
in which the three were successfully engaged
in various Climes, Seasons and Services.
[2] _I.e._ Ticonderoga.
XVI
The long, long ascent to Sevenoaks, which crowns a ridge seven hundred
feet above the sea-level, does not lack beauty, lined as it is for a
considerable distance with hedgerow elms. But it puts on another kind
of beauty at night, for as you come past the railway-station, and look
down in the darkness upon the galaxy of red and green signal lights,
it seems like a lavish Arabian Nights display of rubies and emeralds
spread out there, in the black cutting.
The name of the railway-station, on the other hand, is vulgarity
itself. It is known as “Tub’s Hill,” to distinguish it from the other
Sevenoaks station known (from the public-house outside) as “Bat and
Ball.”
Sevenoaks is greatly indebted to the South Eastern Railway for a matter
quite outside railway accommodation. The town had long and vainly been
seeking a good water-supply, and was still upon that quest when this
branch of the South-Eastern was under construction in 1867. What the
town wished to find, and could not, the contractors for the Riverhead
Tunnel found, very much against their will. They struck a spring which
for a time drowned them out and cost enormous sums to divert; but it
gave to the town its present abundant supply.
There can be no place with more divergent roads than those at the
entrance to Sevenoaks. They branch off singly, in pairs and triply,
acutely and gradually, and all with a specious artfulness leading the
unwary anywhere but into the town, and by choice into suburban roads
that presently end in wastes of shingle, heaps of building materials,
and uncompleted houses.
The old Sevenoaks of coaching days is mostly gone, or disguised out of
recognition. There was then a “cage,” or lock-up, in the town, with a
pond in front of it and a ducking-stool for nagging wives or scolding
neighbours. There was also a toll-gate and a weigh-bridge, where heavy
waggons paid according to their showing in tare and tret. Sevenoaks
was, in short, fully equipped with the engines of civilisation as
understood at that period.
The “Chequers” inn, which still projects a somewhat old-fashioned front
beyond the general building line, is a kind of “Jack o’ Both Sides,”
for it has another, and quite different, frontage on to the parallel
street. It was in those days the starting and arrival point of a coach
to and from London, supported by a select few who had business in the
metropolis, and from that circumstance was called the “United Friends.”
Peacock, the coachman, was said to bear a striking resemblance to
Tony Weller, which is not remarkable when we consider that Dickens
constructed that plethoric, red-cheeked person from the typical
stage-coachman of his age. There were then, in fact, “Tony Wellers,”
like “Samivel’s” father, on every road. The coach was jointly owned by
Benjamin Worthy Horne, John Stephens, and John Newman.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BLACKBOY” INN.]
The “Wheatsheaf” has long since been transformed into offices, and the
“Crown,” that once owned a gallows-sign stretching across the road,
has been given a modernised grey stucco front, and looks rather like
a banking establishment. Among minor inns, the “Blackboy,” displaying
the effigy of a little nigger, is of considerable age, and takes its
name from the now extinct local Blackboy family who flourished greatly
in Sevenoaks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more
modern inns include the “Bricklayers’ Arms,” whose device—_not_ granted
by the College of Arms—is an ingenious arrangement of plumb-board and
trowel.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BRICKLAYERS’ ARMS.”]
But all Sevenoaks inns, past or present, yield in interest to the fine
old mansion facing the high road near the church, and known as “The Old
House.” All details of its history have been lost, and it is only known
that it was once the “Three Cats”—probably “The Cats”—inn, celebrated
by that late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century poet, Tom Durfey,
who was kept by his patron, the sixth Earl of Dorset, at Knole as a
mirth-maker and general bacchanalian laureate. You cannot imagine a
poet with the Christian name of Tom being other than a bard of the
barrel; and as for Tom Durfey, he was the most bacchic songster, and
the dirtiest rhymester of all the dirty dogs of his age: which is why
he is so reprobated by the good—and so read.
In his song in praise of the “Incomparable Strong Beer of Knoll,” he
says:
There’s Adams, in hoping to pleasure his town,
Declares the best French wine is sold at the “Crown,”
And well it may be, for he takes good rates,
And so does my jolly sleek friend at the “Cats.”
But to strong beer my praises must come,
Leave them to isinglass, egg-whites, and stum.
Beer, fine as Burgundy, lifts high my soul
When Joudrain perks up for the honour of Knoll.
The “Cats” of course derived its sign from the arms of the lords of the
manor, the Sackvilles of Knole, whose “supporters” are two leopards
argent spotted sable, easily to be mistaken by the rustics of a land
where leopards are not among the native fauna, for cats. It must have
been an aristocrat among inns, for it remains still one of the noblest
houses in Sevenoaks, with handsome red brick frontage of the time of
William the Third or Queen Anne, with beautiful gardens in the rear,
and others, equally beautiful, in front, on the opposite side of the
road. It must have ceased to be an inn shortly after Tom Durfey wrote,
for it has been in occupation as a private residence of the Austen
family since about the middle of the eighteenth century.
Opposite is the very beautiful, characteristically “Queen Anne”-style
house, “The Chantry,” standing next the church and on the site of a
demolished ecclesiastical building. It has lately been most exquisitely
restored.
The church itself, a large building with a tall tower, is of a somewhat
uninteresting Perpendicular design. The curious may notice in the
churchyard a stone to “Milenda,” wife of one Joseph Kennard.
A monument in the north aisle to William Lambarde, who wrote the
“Perambulation of Kent,” and died in 1601, was removed from Greenwich.
Among the others, there are singularly modest tablets to the Amhersts.
The most important is that to the charitable Lady Boswell, who died
1692, aged apparently thirty-seven, for the inscription says: “During
xxxvii years she conversed amõg us mortals.” She left sums for “fifteen
of the poorest Children to be instructed in y^e Catechism of ye Church
of England,” and for the much more practical purpose of teaching them
to “write and cast accompts” and to apprentice them to “handycraft
trades or employments.” Her school is a prominent, and very grim,
object on entering the town.
[Illustration: OLD MANSION, FORMERLY THE “CATS” INN.]
The most famous native of Sevenoaks is undoubtedly the mediæval Sir
William Sevenoke, whose career was remarkably romantic. According to
all received accounts, he was a foundling, discovered as a baby in
the hollow of a tree in the immediate neighbourhood of the town by
one Sir William Rumpstede, who named him “William” after himself,
and “Sevenoke,” or “Sevenoaks,” after the town; brought him up, and
apprenticed him to Hugh de Bois, citizen and ferrer (or ironmonger), of
London.
Let us linger a moment to consider how popular in ancient times was
this finding of neglected children in casual places by charitable
knights. The frequency of it is a little suspicious. The most famous
foundling incident (after that of Moses) is the finding, early in the
fourteenth century, of one of the ancestors of the Stanleys. According
to the legend, Sir Thomas de Latham was walking with his lady, who was
childless, in his park, when they drew near to a wild and lonely spot
where they found a baby boy, dressed in rich swaddling clothes, in an
eagle’s nest. The knight acted astonishment; the good unsuspecting
lady looked upon the baby as a present from heaven. It was adopted
and educated in the name of Latham, eventually succeeding to his
father’s and his adopted mother’s property. In the course of years this
foundling’s daughter Isabel married Sir John Stanley, who adopted the
Eagle and Child crest still borne by the Earls of Derby.
But to return to William Sevenoke. He became a grocer, and eventually,
in 1418, Lord Mayor of London, became Member of Parliament, was
knighted, and was granted for coat of arms seven acorns. To him
Sevenoaks owes its endowed Grammar School and almshouses. Whether they
were descendants of his whose name became corrupted into Sennocke is
not quite clear, but it is quite certain that the unlovely name of
Snooks derives from a further debasement of it.
The schools and almshouses were rebuilt in 1727, and are generally
thought by passing strangers to be a workhouse or a penitentiary. It
will thus be gathered that they are not beautiful. If strict discipline
may be read into the ancient seal of the school, then it was in old
times governed on the principle of Winchester, “learn or be whopped,”
for that device exhibits a gigantic, Jove-like master presiding over a
number of scholars, evidently in fear of the immense birch he holds in
his right hand. A resolute application of the weapon represented here
would undoubtedly result in abolishing laziness in the scholar given a
taste of it.
[Illustration: SEAL OF SEVENOAKS GRAMMAR SCHOOL.]
XVII
When you know Sevenoaks well, have learned its geographical situation,
and have inquired into its surroundings, you will begin to perceive
that it was once very humbly dependent upon the great historic
residence of Knole, whose park it on one side fringes. Knole divides
with the not far distant Penshurst the reputation of being the finest
baronial pile in England. If their ancient lords could return to
Penshurst and Knole they would still find there many of the buildings
and appointments they knew; and if the less ancient Elizabethans
and Jacobeans were permitted to revisit their homes they would see
them very much as they were, and so come back without any sense of
strangeness.
Knole, of course, takes its name from its hilly situation. There are
dim and fragmentary records of a former house, away back in the reign
of King John. At that time it belonged to a great historical personage,
William Mareschal, Earl of Pembroke, to whom it came as part of his
wife’s dowry. Eventually it fell to the family of de Say, who for
more than a hundred years ruled the estate, when for an interval it
passed into other hands, only to be repurchased by a Fiennes, who was
on his mother’s side a de Say. This unfortunate Fiennes had the ill
luck to live in the troubled time of Henry the Sixth, and was further
unfortunate in attracting the favour of that ill-starred King, who
heaped many distinctions upon him, all to his undoing. He was created
Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Constable of
Dover Castle, member of the King’s Council, Lord Chamberlain, and Lord
Treasurer of England; and, in fact, closely resembled in real life Pooh
Bah, the “Lord High Everything Else” of _The Mikado_.
The title of Lord Saye and Sele, which still exists as a barony,
re-created in 1603, in the Fiennes family, has a fine sound of
irrevocability about it—a kind of “do and dare,” “what I have said I
_have_ said” connotation—to which it has really no sort of right. Saye,
as we have seen, was a family name, and Sele has in this connection
nothing to do with sealing, signing, and delivering as act and deed. It
comes from the village of Seal, on the other side of Knole Park.
The amazing prosperity and court favour shown to Lord Saye and Sele
raised up many enemies for him, and the King was obliged, first to
sequester him from the office of Lord Treasurer, and then to commit
him to the Tower of London, merely to secure him from the violence of
the discontented people, then seething in the rebellion of Jack Cade,
in 1450. That insurrection brought an exciting moment to Sevenoaks,
for Cade and his army, pursued by some twenty thousand of the King’s
troops from their riotous place of assemblage on Blackheath, turned at
bay upon them, and in the disastrous skirmish of Sole Fields, within
sight of Knole, slew the King’s commander, Sir Humphrey Stafford. Cade,
assuming the armour of the fallen knight, marched to London, where,
according to Shakespeare, he struck the historic London Stone with his
sword and proclaimed himself “lord of this city.” He did more than
that, for he brought the unhappy Lord Saye and Sele forth from his
hiding-hole in the Tower, and hacked his head off at the Standard in
Cornhill, afterwards offering revolting barbarities to his body.
It was the son of this victim of popular revolt who, six years later,
reduced to extremities in the troubles of the time, sold Knole to
Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, for a sum representing £2,500 at
the present day. The manor-house of that time was old and dilapidated,
and Bourchier pulled it down and built the gatehouse and the principal
front of the present group of buildings. Thirty years later he died
and left Knole to the See; and, with all other archbishops, was _ex
officio_, so to speak, collated to the Realms of the Blest. He was
succeeded by Archbishop Morton, who reigned fourteen years; by Henry
Dene (two years), by Warham for thirty years; and then by Cranmer, who
in 1537, from motives of policy, surrendered it to the Crown.
Politic indeed, for the Archbishops of Canterbury at that time owned
no fewer than sixteen palaces, and men were beginning to inquire by
what right lords spiritual were so gorged with things temporal; just
as in these times of ours the phenomenal wealth of great landowners is
beginning to arouse an inconvenient criticism.
Knole came to the Sackvilles, whose collateral descendants still own
it, from Queen Elizabeth, who in 1567 gave it to Thomas Sackville,
a cousin on her mother’s side. He already owned Buckhurst, and she
created him therefore Baron Buckhurst; which is, as every one will
acknowledge, a fruity-flavoured title. “Baron Buckhurst:” how finely
it trips off the tongue! The Queen gave as a reason for her gift
the “keeping him near her court and councils, that he might repair
thither on any emergency with more expedition than he could from his
seat of Buckhurst in Sussex, the roads to which county were at times
impassable.”
Lord Buckhurst was, in fact, a _persona grata_ at court: a man of wit,
a poet, a dramatist. Also a man of tact and management, for in his old
age, in 1603, he was created Earl of Dorset by Gloriana’s successor,
James the First.
And so the descent continued from first to seventh earl, who succeeded
like chapters in a history, of which a new volume opened with the
seventh earl being created a duke.
The fourth duke, George John Frederick Sackville, came to a tragic end
in 1815, in his twenty-second year. He was an adventurous horseman, and
on a visit to Lord Powerscourt, in Ireland, fell with his horse in the
hunting-field at Killiney. The horse fell on him and crushed in his
chest.
They brought his body home with every circumstance of mortuary pomp, as
befitted a duke; he lay in state at many inns on the several stages of
the Holyhead Road, from Ireland to London, and finally was laid to rest
with his fathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in Sussex.
With the widow of his cousin and successor in the title, the fifth and
last duke, another volume ended, in 1825.
The ownership of Knole devolved upon Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister
of the unfortunate fourth duke. She married the fifth Earl De La
Warr, and thus changed the name of the lords of Knole to that of
Sackville-West. Her eldest son became in due course Lord De La Warr:
to the younger sons she left Knole, and in their favour the barony of
Sackville was created, in 1876.
XVIII
The long street of Sevenoaks acts, as it were, the office of screen
to the leafy glades, the hills and dells of Knole Park, to which you
come along an alley between the houses. It is an extremely large park,
and in many places peculiarly beautiful. To set down in this place
its acreage and its circumference of six miles would convey a very
dim impression of its proportions, but if we say it is two-thirds the
size of Richmond Park its extent will be more generally understood.
The house itself—if it be no derogation to style Knole merely a
house—stands quite half a mile within the park, on a height, and looks,
with its ranges of gables, towers, roofs, and chimney-pots, like
some mediæval town. Great herds of red and fallow deer browse amid
the bracken, or shelter under the great beeches, and regard the many
visitors with an amiable and fearless expression, except in the “fence
months,” October and November, when they are quite ferocious, and
bellow day and night like the bulls of Bashan.
[Illustration: KNOLE, FROM THE ROAD.]
Knole is a “show place.” You may roam where you please in the park, and
on most days, within easily ascertainable hours, you can be shown over
the vast place on payment of two shillings. You would not be permitted
so much in the millionaires’ palaces of democratic America.
In this gigantic place Lord Sackville and his family occupy a small
suite of rooms furnished in modern style, and, if you consider it
closely, are practically the caretakers of a vast museum of antiquities
maintained at their own expense. The place is so extensive, and the
maintenance and repairs so costly, that it would require the revenue of
one of the great landlords of London to keep it up, and, in addition,
to live in fitting state, and the Sackville-Wests have not those
resources.
Some day a paternal Government will come to the rescue of owners of
historic houses of public interest. There is a widely prevalent idea
that all governments are paternal to one class, and act in a dominie
and minatory manner to the others. Conservatives, in this belief, play
the beneficent father to the aristocracy and their fringe, and waggle
weapons of punishment at the lower classes; while the Liberals (in the
accepted idea) pat the middle classes and the working men on the head
and give them something to go away and play with; and then, turning up
their sleeves and selecting a fine birch-rod, bid dukes and earls to
come here this instant moment and take their trousers down. It is not
really precisely like that, but Sir William Harcourt did something of
the kind with his Death Duties. At any rate, those are the respective
aspirations of free and enlightened voters on either side.
A fatherly Conservative Government may, therefore, some day be expected
to come handsomely to the rescue of the owners of historic mansions:
owners with acres of reception-rooms, picture-galleries, and baronial
halls; owners with long pedigrees but slim purses, who can scarcely
afford even to keep their many windows cleaned, let alone maintain
floors and roofs and keep the moth out of priceless ancient tapestries
and silken hangings. Such a Government will allocate grants annually
to those proprietors who habitually admit sightseers, and who make
application for aid; and surely the principle would be just, for
it certainly is scarcely fair to the proprietors of such places as
Knole, if witness to their good nature, that they should expend their
substance chiefly for the delight of the tourist and sightseer.
The next step would be a competitive measure introduced by the
inevitable Liberal Government ordained by the well-known fickleness
of the electorate, by which all historic mansions would be scheduled
and administered as to their “show” parts by a Department responsible
for the safe and careful keeping of artistic and historic treasures,
endangered by the carelessness, the poverty, or even the uninstructed
enthusiasm of their owners. It will all some day come to pass.
It is obvious that a great range of buildings like Knole, covering
nearly four acres, dating back, in part, four hundred years, and filled
to overcrowding with things precious intrinsically and by association,
must involve the existence of a large staff; and it must be at least
equally obvious that no lord of Knole could without great physical
effort use even a respectable proportion of his three hundred and
sixty-five rooms, traverse his fifty-two staircases, or look forth
daily from more than ten per cent. of his five hundred and forty
windows.
The house stands in what is probably the least attractive portion of
the park, where the grass is tough and wiry, and like that of some
untended prairie. The long, dark-grey, stone front, pierced with
mullioned windows, is like that of an ancient Oxford college. You are
personally struck with the resemblance, and, reading the impressions
of bygone visitors, you find they have all been impressed in the same
way. Every gable is surmounted by the leopard “_sejant affronté_” of
the Sackville coat of arms, looking like so many tomcats obeying the
instruction of some unseen drill-master: “Eyes right.”
[Illustration: THE GATEWAY, KNOLE.]
The sternly walled-in character of Knole would discourage a burglar,
just as it was intended to give pause to any hostile visitor; for
the times when it was built were halting between the necessity for
fortresses and the liking for magnificence and display. Thus Knole
partakes of the character of both castle and palace.
XIX
No armed guard meets you now: only a porter. There are many kinds of
porters. There is the fish-porter of Billingsgate; there are also the
railway-porter and the warehouse-porter, to name none others; but
it is unthinkable to class the porter of Knole with these. Porters,
I should suppose, by the etymology of their name, to be bearers of
burdens, carriers, humpers of grievous loads; but this dignified person
is rather of the bank-porter variety, own brother to those of the
Bank of England, and carries nothing but a highly respectable suit of
clothes and an aristocratic air. I am quite sure he is more dignified
than even Lord Sackville himself, and his portly presence, his black
swallow-tailed coat, his silk hat, and his red waistcoat give a more
soothing effect of the permanence of things than even the grey walls of
Knole can manage to impart.
The porter’s lodge itself is a little museum of antiquities. There are
the flint-lock muskets, the torch-holders, the brass-bound leather
skullcaps, the cartridge-boxes, halberds, and other weapons of offence
and defence belonging to the Earls and Dukes of Dorset from Jacobean
to Mid-Georgian times: necessary equipments for the bodyguard of my
lords and their visitors in those “good” old days. Here, too, you see
the ancient horn-lanterns and the silver maces that were part of the
display and the feeble illumination of those trains; and on the whole
you are very glad that this is the twentieth century, and that these
are outworn relics whose use has long since passed.
The gatehouse tower and porter’s lodge lead into the first, or Green
Court, one of the seven quadrangles included within the group of
buildings, and so called from its lawns and to distinguish it from the
next, flagged with pavement, and styled the Stone Court. The first
is graced by two classic bronze statues: the “Venus Anadyomene” and
the “Gladiator Repellens.” The Stone Court leads by an insignificant
loggia, supported on Jacobean pillars, to the Great Hall, built between
the years 1603-8 by that magnificent person the first Earl of Dorset,
who in all those years gave constant employment to two hundred men, in
his alterations and repairs, and spent £20,000 on furnishing a bedroom
for the expected visit of James the First to him.
The Great Hall was the banqueting-room. It has a boldly carved oak
screen, in the characteristic Jacobean taste, but painted and grained,
in some barbaric period, to _resemble_ oak! Oak, you will observe,
painted to resemble itself! To paint the lily and to gild refined gold
were no greater works of supererogation. It is difficult to understand
why it was done, here and elsewhere.
Ascending by the Painted Staircase, you come, in succession, to the
Ball-room, the Reynolds Room, the Cartoon Gallery, the King’s Bedroom,
the Chapel Room, Organ Room, Brown Gallery, Lady Betty Germaine’s
rooms, old Billiard-room, Spangled Bedroom, Crimson Drawing-room,
and so forth; seventeen in all, filled with the most wonderful old
furniture, gigantic bedsteads, priceless china, paintings by the most
revered masters, and portraits of a long dignified line of Sackvilles,
Earls and Dukes of Dorset: great gentlemen and great patrons of the
arts.
[Illustration: THE STONE COURT, KNOLE.]
There they hang; rows of them. Grave-faced, dignified personages, whom
not all the feminine frippery that characterised masculine costume in
Elizabethan, Carolean, and Jacobean times can make look foolish. They
look responsible persons, weighted with the mellow gravity that could
not well be absent in times when the headsman’s axe was an institution.
But they could not _all_ be so wise as they look; something—and that
not in small or grudging measure—must be due to courtly palettes. The
thought is treason towards the Muse of History, of course; but surely
_we_ of this day, rich as we are in the little tin gods of politics,
have not the monopoly of them, and may find an invertebrate Balfour or
so amid these reverend seigneurs who look so inscrutably wise.
XX
The Dukes of Dorset were not merely men with titles; they were ducal
Dukes, who lived up to their strawberry-leaves, and had a ducal way
with them; were dukes first and men a very long way after. There are
none such now. The mould is broken, the recipe forgotten, the pattern
mislaid. How sad! That must be a degenerate age whose dukes are so
uncharacteristic of their order; whose aldermen, who macerate on
charcoal biscuits, are lean dyspeptics, talk art criticism, and shudder
at the idea of a banquet; who are no longer those rotund, well-larded
figures of convention that drank incredible quantities of fruity port
and turtle-soup. That must be an effete generation whose new-rich no
longer strew their way with dropped aitches; whose paupers, instead of
skilly, dine royally off the best joints, and eat the finest bread,
and when they ask for more—get it. In short, your typical pauper,
millionaire, alderman, or duke no longer exists in real life. Even the
novelists have learned their lesson and know better. Only on the stage
shall you find those outmoded figures still strutting, and even _there_
they are on their last legs. The stage is the last ditch of convention;
but the time is at hand when some dramatist will give us a stout and
haughty workhouse inmate, a humble and cringing duke, and an alderman
virtuoso; and he will be quite as loudly hailed for an emancipator as
ever was Robertson.
The Dukes of Dorset lived up to the fine alliteration of their title,
and when that became impossible, they died out, like the oxyrhincus
and the mastodon, who could not survive their environment. There
is scarce a modern duke who, in the spectacular way, is worthy his
title. Some are bored men and commonplace; most of them “splendidly
null,” as Tennyson might say. I know an undersized duke with a limp
and a falsetto voice, who takes photographs with a hand-camera and an
apologetic manner; and another with the appearance and carriage of an
unsuccessful commercial traveller. They would be ashamed to be ducal in
their behaviour; and it is quite certain that their forbears would be
ashamed of them.
To view Knole intimately is not given to the many. What are seventeen
rooms out of three hundred and sixty-five, even though they be rooms of
State! In fact it is rather in the more ordinary rooms, if any of those
at Knole can so be styled, that you read its everyday story of old.
After all, the Lords of Knole were not always entertaining kings and
great nobles. Sometimes they had a “day off,” no less than the British
workman of this era of ours, and then they were a thought more easy and
less splendid, and occupied the second-best rooms, just as the ordinary
Briton of to-day does, when he is not wanting to “show off.”
I am afraid we all want to impress the visitor with a magnificence
that is not kept up when he is gone. The lower-class parlour, the
drawing-room of the upper strata, are the superstitions not only
of to-day, or of one or two classes. They probably go back to the
beginning of things, when even Prehistoric Man had his ordinary cave to
live in and his extraordinary, in which his wife “received.”
[Illustration: THE SOUTH FRONT, KNOLE.
_Photo by C. Essenhigh Corke & Co._]
There are thus whole suites of ancient rooms at Knole, now silent
and deserted; and overhead, above the long galleries of stately
magnificence, are interminable attics, called “wardrobes,” not
because of being storerooms of clothes, old or new; but presumably
the playrooms of the boys and lads of good family who, after the old
English custom, were sent to Knole under wardship of the noble owners,
to learn the usages of good society and the duties of chivalrous
knights. In short, Knole, and every other castle or stately
mansion, was, as it were, a training-college, a seminary of deportment
and knightly devoirs; and in them one learned that good form whose
inculcation is supposed to be the only value of Oxford and Cambridge at
this day.
[Illustration: THE “DUMB BELL.”]
An odd surviving relic of Knole as a College of Good Manners is the
curious contrivance known as the “Dumb Bell,” in that one of these
wardrobes styled the “Dumb Bell Gallery.” It very closely resembles
the windlass seen over old country wells, with a roller on which is
wound a rope that descends through a hole cut in the floor, into
the billiard-room. The arms projecting from the roller are iron,
tipped with lead. This machine, which appears to date back to about
the beginning of the seventeenth century, is thought to have been
in the nature of a “home exerciser,” and to have been suggested by
the bell-ropes and the exercise of bell-ringing in church towers.
Here, however, the athlete could bring up his muscles without being a
nuisance to every one within earshot. From this originated the name
of those very different objects, used however for the same purpose of
exercising—the modern “dumb-bells.”
XXI
And so, farewell Knole, mausoleum of a departed condition of things,
treasure-house of art and tradition, puppet-show for the summer throng.
One looks for it, topping the sky-line, expectantly, and leaves it with
regret; unlike those two tramps seen and heard on this very road by the
present writer. One of them listlessly noticed its towers and gables.
“Wot’s thet?” he asked his mate: not that he was interested, but for
the sake of something to say. How can you be interested in anything
when you are footsore but your feet?
“Corsel,” replied the other, shortly; “_carm_ on.” But he need not
have bidden his fellow “come on,” for he had not given the “castle”
another glance, and had never halted a moment.
[Illustration: THE SEVEN OAKS.]
The road descending steeply from Sevenoaks and having Knole Park on its
left is the coaching highway, improved upon the ancient road. It is
steep now, but how much steeper, how rugged and how narrow may be seen
towards the bottom of the dip, where a little gate admits through the
oaken palings of the park, and leads down a hollow lane whose banks are
thickly set with ancient thorns and other trees. It is, or was before
the embanked road was made, known locally by the names of “Shangden,”
“Shand End,” or “Chene Dene,” in delightful incertitude.
_This_ is the original road, preserved for the last seventy years or
so in the bottom, where the modern highway was slightly deviated and
constructed at a higher level. It is a surviving portion of that road
Archbishop Islip, travelling horseback to Tonbridge in 1362, found so
extremely bad. He struggled persistently, but at last fell from his
horse and became “wet through all over.” In that pitiable condition he
mounted again and rode on, without any change of clothes, and so was
seized with paralysis.
An archway under the modern road, seen even more distinctly from
a bye-road branching off to the right, was made for the especial
purpose of maintaining unbroken the old line of an even more ancient
cross-road—a pack-horse way—which crossed the old road from Sevenoaks
to Tonbridge in the hollow, at right angles. The arch, however, has
long been blocked up with timbering, and the pack-horse route is
scarcely discernible in the park and the meadows.
Coming to the next rise, crowned by the “White Hart” inn, a line of
seven trees is seen in the hedgerow on the right hand. These are the
comparatively modern seven oaks planted at some uncertain time to
commemorate those that are supposed to have originated the name of the
neighbouring town. There is considerable difference in the size of
the trees, and it is thus to be presumed that some of the seven were,
from some cause or other, destroyed, and replaced later. The oldest
may date back two centuries, the others sixty years or so later. No
information exists as to who planted them, or when; even the site of
the old original seven oaks that gave the town of Sevenoaks its name,
away back in the dark ages, is unknown.
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HART” INN.]
This is the summit of River Hill: a place which figures in an early
sixteenth-century trust-fund that offers some entertaining history.
XXII
The road to Hastings, or to Rye, was the beneficiary of a bequest left
in 1526 by James Wilford, a successor of those “pious benefactors” who
from the earliest times, for the good of their souls less than for love
of their kind, had been wont to repair highways, build bridges and
causeways, and perform the like services, either by direct gifts or
through the intermediary of the Church.
Of the practical piety of James Wilford I think there can be little
doubt. In the times when he lived, Reformation was in the air.
The religious houses were moribund, and had Henry the Eighth not
disestablished and suppressed them, another would have done so. People
rather scoffed at the idea of purchasing salvation by bequests, just as
you in modern times insure against fire. Wilford, therefore, in that
he does not appear to have left his money with any ulterior object of
saving his soul, was really more pious than he knew, and perhaps saved
it the more certainly. Let us trust he is enjoying the full credit of
his good deed.
This public benefactor, a “rippier” of Rye, and said to have been an
alderman of London, in his will of 1526 stated that he had actually
_made_ the road from River Hill to Northiam church, a length of some
twenty-six miles; and for the perpetual repair of the ruinous parts
he left an annuity of £7, charged upon the “Saracen’s Head,” Friday
Street, Cheapside, belonging to the Merchant Taylors’ Company.
There had been sufficient reasons in his lifetime for him to make or
amend this road; for by the term “rippier” a fish-carrier was meant,
and James Wilford would appear to constantly have travelled it in
his business of supplying London with fish, carried on horseback
in panniers. That it should have been possible to convey fish this
distance in the early part of the sixteenth century so expeditiously
that it arrived in good condition is a somewhat striking testimony to
the enterprise of an age commonly thought to have been ignorant of
speedy communications.
The Merchant Taylors were by the terms of this will to pay the
£7 annually to the executors and relatives bearing the name of
Wilford, and after their death were to make payment to the vicar and
churchwardens of Rye. In the event of those authorities neglecting
their duty of applying the money for the benefit of the road, the
annuity was to be paid to the vicar and churchwardens of Northiam; and,
should they default, was then to devolve upon Newenden.
These cautious provisions seem to have been prophetic, for Rye _did_
actually at some uncertain time lose the money, which was then received
by Northiam until Midsummer, 1799, when, from some dereliction of
duty, it passed, as directed, to Newenden. Disputes then appear to
have arisen, for in 1804 the Merchant Taylors, not quite sure of their
position, refused any longer to pay the amount until a legal decision
was arrived at. The whole matter then remained in abeyance, as probably
being too small a sum to worry about, until 1819. By that time the
twenty years’ accumulation was worth having, and the inhabitants of
Rye, Northiam, and Newenden accordingly joined forces and petitioned
the Merchant Taylors, praying them to disburse the money to Rye, which
was done, the vicar and churchwardens of that town in turn handing it
over to the commissioners of the turnpike road from Flimwell to Rye.
The sum of £140 was then paid over, from which the Land Tax authorities
sweated £28, twenty years’ land-tax, at 28_s._ a year.
Flimwell is the point where the road to Rye branches from the Hastings
Road. Nineteen and a half miles of road, therefore, appear by this
decision to have been cut off from these small mercies.
The trifling sum now trickles into the revenue of the Kent County
Council.
River Hill was once—in the days of inefficient brake-power—a terror
to cyclists. A terror with reason, for it is three-quarters of a mile
long, and not straight; and it has notoriously been the scene of many
accidents at the two sharp turns in its course—one left and one right.
A joint C.T.C. and N.C.U. danger-board at the beginning is supplemented
by the notice that it is unrideable without a brake; but that is as
may be. When the first chapter of cycling was being enacted, an early
wheelman rode it, quite inadvertently, and lived to tell the tale, in
picturesque fashion.
In the ancient days of cycling, when it had not long ceased to he
“velocipeding” and was still in the intermediate stage of “bicycling,”
this greatly daring person decided to ride from Greenwich to
Burwash—some fifty miles—on what was then, with the most exquisite
appropriateness, called a “bone-shaker.” It was so unusual and
adventurous a thing to do that he wrote an account of it, and it duly
appears in the records of that time. He thought how splendid a thing
it would be to run hundreds of miles about the country at “a speed of
from ten to fourteen miles an hour,” as in the advertisements, and so
purchased what he thought to be a very camelopard of a machine, with
45-in. wheels.
In two days he had so mastered this fearsome contrivance that he
decided to start, and did so, in the evening. He had not gone more than
a mile or two when he met a butcher standing in the middle of the road,
who continued to stand there until he was run into, when both were
upset. The bicyclist was pitched over the handles and cut his knee, and
the butcher abused him until the cyclist—I mean the bicyclist—showed
fight, when he made off.
By the time this early wheelman had reached Bromley he was
almost exhausted, and realised that he, at any rate, was not a
fourteen-mile-an-hour rider. There was also, he discovered, an
undue proportion of hills to be climbed—a discovery still being
re-discovered daily by thousands of his descendants in straddling two
wheels.
[Illustration: RIVER HILL AND THE KENTISH WEALD]
At Bromley he rested and refreshed; and again, at 9 p.m. at Sevenoaks,
where his exertions had given him such an appetite that, when he
had finished discussing the cold beef, he dared not look at the
waiter. At River Hill—even in these days to be descended with extra
caution—the rough road broke his primitive brake, and then at last—oh,
happiness!—he found himself going fourteen miles an hour—and a bit
over. There was no stopping, and the only thing to be done was to
keep in the middle of the road, continually shouting, and in the hope
nothing was in the way. Not even nowadays would a cyclist care to
descend River Hill in this manner, in the dark, brakeless; but this
adventurous one found the level, and, passing through Tunbridge Wells,
at last reached his destination with only an incidental attack upon him
by a foxhound on the way.
The view from River Hill is delightful, ranging across the wooded
valley of the Medway to the heights where Tunbridge Wells is situated.
So wooded is it that even Tonbridge itself, near at hand, is invisible,
and the little village of Hildenborough—with scarcely more houses to it
than there are letters in its name—might be non-existent.
A green, smiling woodland vale: just that. Not a profound, romantic
depth, but a widespread, all-embracing view of meadows, corn-fields,
parks, and hop-gardens: suave, well-ordered, appealing even more to the
farmer than to the landscape-painter. Such is the Weald of Kent. Remote
from the vulgar herd, who—
“Gawblimee!”
“What was that? Hark! there it is again.”
“’Strewth! ’Fyaint leff me blooming pipe beyine.”
“Leavyer bloomined beyine nex’ time, fatted.”
“Garn, fatted yer bloomin’ self.”
Hop-pickers, tramping and quarrelling their way down to the Kentish
hop-gardens. And not always quarrelling, for their moods are even
as those of an April day, wherein sunshine and clouds are for ever
alternating. Listen to them as they go “piping down the valley wild,
singing songs of pleasant glee”:
Skoylork, skoylork, upin ther skoy so oi,
If ermong ther aingils muvver you should see,
Awsk ‘er if she’ll come dahn agine
To pussy, daddy, an’ me.
Here are your true sentimentalists.
At the foot of the hill lies Hildenborough, a tiny hamlet with a modern
church, until comparatively recent years figuring merely as Hilden, or
Hilden Green. The meaning of “Hilden” is obvious here. It is simply
descriptive of the situation of the place: in the dene, or valley,
beneath River Hill.
Borough, as commonly understood, is a ridiculous misnomer in this
place, but it appears to have been brought into use as some way of
indicating the existence here of a manor separate from, and independent
of, Tonbridge, whose suburban houses now begin to mingle with it.
XXIII
The town of Tonbridge lies in the valley of the Medway, and the river
itself runs through what is now the centre of the borough. Originally,
however, the town was situated on the north bank only; and all that
portion—now an intimate part of the place—over the bridge was in the
open country.
There are but two bridges across the Medway nowadays, one large and
one other very small; but in the early days of Tonbridge there were
no fewer than five, for if you look at the maps you will perceive the
Medway spreading out from Yalding into five tributaries, like the
fingers of your hand, over the two miles’ breadth of flat country
between River Hill and the foothills of Hildenborough and the heights
of Somerhill and Quarry Hill, on the way to Tunbridge Wells.
According to some authorities, it was to these bridges that Tonbridge
owed its name, but it seems probable that those channels were not
bridged, but were merely fords, at the time when the town was baptized;
and we must seek for the origin of the name rather in “Ton-burig”—the
great Saxon “burh” or artificial mound on which the keep of Tonbridge
Castle stood from the earliest times, guarding the passage of the
river. Thus the place-name should properly have become “Tonbury,” but
the bridges in the meanwhile got themselves built and, becoming the
most striking feature of the place, crept illegitimately, at a very
early period, into the name of it. In this way we find “Tonebridge”
mentioned in 1088, and afterwards meet such variants as “Tunebricgia,”
“Tunebregge,” “Tunebrugge,” and “Tonebryge.”
Mediæval Tonbridge was a walled town and moated, both as to town in
general and castle in particular. It was, accordingly, in its own
special way, as strongly defensible as though situated on some craggy
height. You could not come into it save by water, and not then except
by favour and permission of those who guarded the gates.
[Illustration: TONBRIDGE CASTLE.]
This stronghold was successively the lordship of the Fitz Gilberts,
the great Earls of Clare, the Earls of Gloucester, and the Staffords
and Dukes of Buckingham: all of whom were, in respect of it, chief
butlers and stewards of his Grace the Right Reverend Father in God, the
Archbishop of Canterbury for the time being. Of those prelates they
held the place by the grand sergeantry of serving in those capacities
at the enthronisation of their Graces.
Those great earls left nothing to chance. They not only walled and
embattled their town, and moated it, but on the prehistoric mound by
the river they reared a keep and around it built a high wall with
towers, and moated that as well. This was their castle; and although
the ditches they dug are dried up and filled in, and the walls are for
the most part gone, there yet remains the great Gateway of their hold
to tell us something of its strength. It is a most worshipful Gateway:
strong and tall and massive, so that one cannot, in naming it, do else
than give it a capital G. There is scarce a more impressive Gateway in
England. It was built somewhere about 1290, in the reign of Edward the
First, as the architecture of its great drum-towers shows, and was the
last word in massive fortification of that time: the walls ten feet
thick and fifty-three feet high, the gloomy entrance arch ribbed with
immense ribs of stone, the outer face of the towers relieved only by
narrow slits for arrows. The workmanship was superb, and although more
than six hundred years have passed since these stones were wrought so
well and jointed so neatly, they remain perfect to this day.
There are dungeons in those towers; there is a hidden watergate to the
river; there is, in fact, every circumstance of romance. Little wonder
that in their Castle the lords of Tonbridge felt sometimes defiant.
There was, indeed, one lord, Roger de Clare, who, even before this grim
Gateway was built, and before his position could be so secure, felt
strong enough to defy his liege, to defy even the great Archbishop,
Thomas à Becket himself, and to treat his messenger with contempt.
His Grace’s pursuivant came with archiepiscopal parchments, formidably
engrossed and alarmingly sealed, but what did that haughty castellan
do? He made the unhappy man _eat_ the documents, “especially,” we are
told, “the seals.” Well for that miserable man that he came merely from
the Archbishop, and not with deeds from the King, given under the Great
Seal! He survived the light repast, but he could scarce have stomached
such a banquet as that would have made.
It would be an unprofitable exercise to trace the ownership of the
Castle through the centuries; “suffice it to say,” as the Early
Victorian novelists were wont to remark—that it came in course of
time to one John Hooker. In 1797, that worthy demolished most of it,
and with the materials thus obtained built the curious house that now
adjoins the Gateway, which he probably would have destroyed as well,
but that the work would have been very costly.
Later, the house was a school, to which period, doubtless, the bust of
the anonymous tutelary genius over the porch belongs. Quite recently,
the Castle has been acquired by the town, and in the beautiful
gardens there are flower-shows, and, I believe, even a band-stand and
penny-in-the-slot machines.
From the Castle the pilgrim naturally seeks the church, expecting to
see many and stately memorials of those ancient lords. But he will find
no trace of them. At some remote period, even before the church was
“thoroughly restored” in 1870, improving besoms came and swept them out
of existence. We may well pause here and consider with what astonishing
completeness things venerable have vanished from Tonbridge. There was
once, for example, south of the town, the Augustinian Priory founded by
the de Clares. Wolsey seized its revenues and squelched it, on behalf
of his proposed “Cardinal College” at Oxford, and the last few remains
were abolished in 1839, when the South Eastern Railway came. The
goods-station stands on the site.
Tonbridge church is disappointing, and it is not improved by the large
churchyard, filled with dense files of tombstones, around it. They are
so many that it is impossible to verify the existence of the scandalous
epitaph alleged to be there, on a drunkard:
Hail!
This stone marks the spot
Where a notorious sot
Doth lie;
Whether at rest or not
It matters not
To you or I.
Oft to the “Lion” he went, to fill his horn,
Now to the grave he’s gone, to get it warm.
_Beered by public subscription by his hail and stout companions, who
deeply lament his absence._
The presumption is that it is a sheer invention, like a very large
proportion of such things printed in collections of epitaphs.
XXIV
[Illustration: THE “CHEQUERS,” TONBRIDGE.]
The general impression of Tonbridge (which elects to spell its “ton”
with an “o,” in contradistinction from the “u” of Tunbridge Wells)
is one of meanness and squalor. There is the fine Grammar School at
the entrance to it, and handsome estates surround the town, but that
impression lasts, and seems rather to be intensified by the gradual
widening of the High Street and the replacing of the picturesque old
houses by flashy modern buildings. That highly sketchable old inn, the
“Chequers,” remains, and so does the so-styled “Old Ivy House,” or “Old
Toll House,” in East Street, a fine gabled timber-and-plaster building
of the fifteenth century, where the Portreeve’s duties, or tolls on
cattle and goods entering the town, were paid.
Very observant persons, too, may notice the queer weathervane over
the old shop of a firm of furnishing ironmongers, representing an
old-fashioned sportsman out with his dog, partridge-shooting. I will
not swear it is partridge; it may be grouse, or perhaps even pigeon;
but any one will declare it is not a pheasant.
[Illustration: A SPORTING WEATHER-VANE.]
The way out of Tonbridge lies over the railway bridge, past the
station, where the banging of trucks and the screaming of whistles
are continuous, and South-Eastern trains are, like practical jokers,
for ever pretending to go off, just to flurry and excite nervous
passengers, and then coming back and casually shunting up and down the
sidings when they ought to be miles distant on their journeys; so while
away the hours.
Contemplative persons will notice with delight as they pass that the
lamp over the station door says “Railway-station.” It is a lesson in
the obvious, information for the already fully informed, as little
needed as a label on the parish church.
At a very acute angle right and left the roads respectively to Pembury
and Tunbridge Wells leave Tonbridge and proceed immediately to climb
steep hills out of the Vale of Medway. On the right goes the road to
“the Wells,” up Quarry Hill, and to the left, up Somerhill, ascends
the Hastings Road. At the summit of this very considerable eminence,
where a road on the right-hand leads to Tunbridge Wells, once stood
the toll-house, known (incorrectly) as Wood’s Gate. Its real name was
Woodgate, the spot where that early traveller, Mr. Samuel Jeake, lost
himself so effectually on that January night of long ago.
Tunbridge Wells is not on the direct road to Hastings, but it gave so
distinctive a feature to the first half of the road, and lies so near
at hand, that it will simply not be disregarded.
XXV
The father of Tunbridge Wells was Dudley, Lord North, a dissolute young
nobleman, who in 1605 “fell into a consumption,” and was advised by his
doctors to try the country air and that remedy at the present moment so
much talked of but little practised, unless empty pockets and the lack
of credit compel—the “simple life.”
Suffering from “the pleasures of town,” as to whose nature we need not
inquire too closely lest we be shocked, my lord resorted to Eridge, on
a visit to Lord Abergavenny. But the bracing air did him little good,
and he was returning, despondent, to London in his carriage across the
then lonely woods and heaths, when he noticed a pool of water by the
way, covered with a slimy mineral scum. The idea occurred to him that
here was his remedy. He drank of the water, felt better, and returned
as soon as possible, to drink again and be well. He clearly did not
deserve his good fortune, for he had no sooner recovered his tone
than he “again gave himself up to all the gallantries of the age.”
But medicinal waters—fortunately—make no discrimination between the
deserving and others, and so, by carefully alternating his debaucheries
with spells of fresh air and “taking the waters,” Lord North lived to
the age of eighty-five, and died in 1666, an example to his fellows of
how much you can dare and do if only you do and dare with discretion.
He published a work to show the advantages of the place to his brother
libertines, and in this curious book, entitled “A Forest Promiscuous
of Several Seasons’ Production,” he in this manner claims their
discovery: “The use of Tunbridge and Epsom waters for health and cure
I first made known to London and the King’s people. The Spaw,” that
is, the Spa in Belgium, “is a chargeable and inconvenient journey
to sick bodies, besides the money it carries out of the kingdom and
inconvenience to religion. Much more I could say, but I rather hint
than handle—rather open the door to a large prospect than give it.”
Already, in 1630, twenty-four years after his discovery, he had seen
the place stamped with the approval of royalty, when Henrietta Maria,
Queen of Charles the First, stayed six weeks here under canvas.
It was then quite uncertain what name would find favour among all
those proposed for it. “Queen’s Wells” was suggested, “Frant Wells,”
“Speldhurst Wells”; but the circumstances of travel finally resolved
the choice. Visitors from London not only approached the health-giving
springs by way of Tonbridge, but were originally, in the absolute lack
of accommodation, obliged to lodge in that town, nearly six miles
distant. Thus the springs, by dint of association, became “Tunbridge
Wells,” the spot being actually in the three separate parishes of
Speldhurst, Frant, and Tonbridge.
That famous promenade afterwards known as the Pantiles was first made
in 1638, when the sloping side of a meadow was levelled and embanked to
afford a recreative walk for those who took the waters. Two buildings
only stood on the spot, the Ladies’ and the Gentlemen’s Coffee-houses.
Things remained very much the same through the long years of the
Commonwealth. The “wells” were not deserted, for there were ailing
bodies even among the elect; but the coffee-houses were not so gay, and
the religious cast that came over the scene was reflected in the names
then first given to the encircling hills. The Puritans named them after
some fancied resemblance to Jerusalem, and thus Mount Ephraim and Mount
Sion were christened, and the neighbouring Calverley is in like manner
supposed to derive from “Calvary.”
With the Restoration “the happy springs of Tonbridge” began to grow
merry again, and the card-playing, the dicing, the dancing that were
all ended under Puritan rule grew again furious. There was still no
town, and the men and women of fashion who did not choose to lodge
at Tonbridge had to find rustic accommodation in the cottages of
Speldhurst. Presently wooden huts on wheels appeared on the common,
and were moved from place to place, as the fancy of the fashionables,
playing at rustics, dictated.
To add to the Arcadian delights of that most primitive and pleasant
period in the existence of Tunbridge Wells, a daily fair went forward
at the spring-head. Rosy-cheeked farmers’ daughters brought chickens,
cherries, and cream and sold them with great profit to town gallants,
much too taken with the unspoiled graces of those rustic beauties to
be able to drive bargains; and soon a bazaar became established under
the trees, where milliners designed “rustic” dresses at town prices
for ruralising London fair ladies. You might lose or win a fortune at
basset under those innocent trees, and wind up the summer evening
with open-air dances on the green. It was the “open-air life,” if not
the simple one, that then prevailed, and for at least a century that
was the especial note of Tunbridge Wells. Evelyn describes it as “a
very sweet place, private and refreshing,” but that privacy may be
questioned, for when houses were so few it was impossible to be other
than public, and at a later period, when the town came into existence
around the spring, it was especially ordained by the autocratic Nash
that “every visitor should live in public.”
[Illustration: CHURCH OF KING CHARLES THE MARTYR.]
One of the earliest evidences of the permanence of this settlement
was the building of a chapel, in 1684. This is the existing church,
dedicated by the then ascendant Royalists to “King Charles the Martyr.”
It and the Pantiles—and of course the Common—are the only vestiges of
the Tunbridge Wells of that time.
It is to Queen Anne that we owe the name of the Pantiles. She had
come here while still the Princess Anne, for the health of herself
and her ailing son, the Duke of Gloucester, and gave a hundred pounds
for paving the walk, so that no other little boy, duke or commoner,
should stumble there, as hers had done. When she returned, the next
season, her hundred pounds had been expended in some mysterious way
totally unconnected with pavements, and so, very rightly offended,
she left the place, never to revisit it, even though the authorities
at last hastened to lay the walk with those pantiles that gave it so
distinctive a title. Stone slabs, in 1793, replaced those red tiles,
and for a lengthy period the stupidity of the local governing body
rechristened the famous walk “the Parade,” but it has now reverted to
its original style.
XXVI
Tunbridge Wells of to-day bears not the slightest resemblance, apart
from these three landmarks of Church, Common, and Pantiles, to the
resort of long ago. It is unlike in appearance and manners. To-day
you see an overgrown town with suburban roads climbing up all the
hillsides, and continued, if you explore them, on the corresponding
descent. It is an effect of grey sobriety, for the greatest period of
its expansion was in the ’60’s and ’70’s, when plaster was prevalent;
and its chief hotel was built in the days before architects could
be made to understand that comfort is desired by guests more than
grandeur. To climb up flights of stairs to enter the front door is
a weariness, and bedrooms twice as lofty as they are broad or long
outrage one’s sense of proportion.
Socially, too, Tunbridge Wells of to-day is the antipodes of what it
was. The traveller of old who “took the waters,” presently arriving “by
the grace of God,” in his chariot, or by public coach, did no sooner
come up from Tonbridge within sight of the Spa, than he was assailed
by a swarm of touts who thrust their heads into the windows, eager to
bespeak his custom:
Soon as they set eyes on you, off flies the hat:
Does your honour want this? does your honour want that?
To-day you enter from the railway-station, and the only people who
take any interest in you are the cabmen. That is distinctly a gain,
for touts are an abomination; but the public life once insisted upon
by Nash is as distinctly a loss. The fact is that the English have no
genius for it, and the climate really forbids. Moreover the local
conditions are different. It is a great residential town now, and
visitors are in the minority.
[Illustration: THE PANTILES, TUNBRIDGE WELLS.]
Still you see the Pantiles, with the quaint colonnade and the
overshadowing limes, now grown very reverend trees indeed, but it
is not a scene of gaiety, and when on summer nights the place is
beautifully illuminated with coloured electric lights, and open-air
concerts are held there, it is a crowd of servants and of shopkeepers’
assistants that listens.
Alas! for the red-heeled, red-faced voluptuaries, the patched and
powdered beauties, the morris-dancers, the fiddlers! They have all
danced or hobbled off, and have been long since ferried over to the
other side of Styx. And where they leered and ogled and minced,
“protested,” and “stopped their vitals,” in their eighteenth-century
way, there are a few inquisitive tourists peering about in corners, and
really wondering if all those tales of eld are so much moonshine.
The waters of Tunbridge Wells and the Roman Catholic clergy have,
according to Mrs. Malaprop, one quality in common: both are
“chalybeate.” Perhaps they owed much of their old-time popularity to
being described as “salutiferous,” and certainly they were likely to
impress people more, and to do more imaginary good, under that title
than if merely “health-giving.”
But the good wrought by the water is undoubted. It will not mend
broken bones, nor set up an altogether shattered constitution; it is
not Lethean, and at a draught you do not forget sorrows; but it is
an excellent tonic, and—_experto crede_—good for incipient dyspepsia.
Modern scepticism looks upon the fine air of Tunbridge Wells, rather
than the water, as author of the beneficial effects upon visitors, and
so it is less taken than formerly. It is safe to say that the majority
of those who taste it are impelled by curiosity, and to all the taste
suggests ink.
You come past the Church of King Charles, with its sundial inscribed,
“You may Waste but cannot Stop me,” to the Pantiles and the spring.
The water is, by an old Act of Parliament, free to all, but there are
two granite basins: one, with a gigantic utensil like a pantomime
soup-ladle, with which, bending down, you scoop up the water, in
company with Lazarus and the vulgar herd; another where, in more
genteel fashion, you pay a penny and are handed a glassful by one of
the two old ladies known as “Dippers.” If you please, you can commute
your payments by subscribing 2_s._ a week, 3_s._ 6_d._ for two weeks,
or 30_s._ for a year. By that time the three grains of iron contained
in every gallon of the water should have strung the participant up
to concert-pitch, and have plated his teeth with a coating of iron,
unless he adopts the old custom of cleaning them with sage-leaves,
after drinking.
XXVII
No one would dream of describing Tunbridge Wells as a
“manufacturing town,” but it has, and has had for considerably over two
hundred years, a peculiar industry. Few are those who have not heard of
“Tunbridge ware,” a species of delicate inlay work in coloured woods,
which may be described as mosaic work, something in the nature of
tesselated pavement reduced to terms of wood; the tesseræ in this case
being very thin strips, fillets, and roundels applied in patterns to
work-boxes, inkstands, backs of brushes, and a large variety of fancy
articles.
Any attempt to describe the ware, or the process of its manufacture,
seems at the first blush a rather hopeless enterprise. We may, however,
give another analogy, and compare it with parquetry flooring in
miniature and in many colours.
That it is no mushroom fashion may be discovered by the visitor to
South Kensington, who in the Museum will discover a backgammon-board
designed by the Comte de Grammont and made for him in 1664. He
presented it to Mary Kirke, Maid of Honour to the Queen of Charles
the Second, during a royal visit to “the Welles.” This interesting
evidence of the antiquity of the ware is decorated with forget-me-nots,
interlacing the Count’s initials and those of Mary Kirke, and shows
that the art was even then fully developed.
Fashions change, and in all those years Tunbridge ware has had many
vicissitudes. In the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign a very large
trade was done in a cheap line of articles in light woods—commonly
sycamore—printed upon from transfers, not inlaid in any way, and thus,
strictly speaking, not the true ware at all. Examples of this period
are still to be met with in curiosity shops, with views, not only of
Tunbridge Wells, but of every other place then of popular resort, and
the sight of them brings faint reminiscences of times when girls wore
bonnets and book-muslin dresses and gentlemen still dared to appear in
public in white duck trousers. The ware of that age was, in fact, as
popular then as the little fancy china articles with local armorial
bearings are now.
That fashion passed, and the true manufacture regained its vogue. The
prominent makers for generations had been Fenner & Nye, established on
Mount Ephraim in 1720, succeeded in turn by Edmund Nye, and finally by
Thomas Barton, in 1863. Barton’s showrooms were in the Pantiles until
recent years, but the business, conducted on the old time-honoured
lines of making the best possible article and charging for it
accordingly, could not survive the modern rage for cheapness at the
sacrifice of excellence, and as Barton grew old the business declined
with him and finally gave place to another, where you can still
purchase Tunbridge ware in innumerable forms at popular prices, and be
perfectly satisfied, until it is compared with that of sixty years ago.
The public has no cause for complaint. It pays only for what it gets;
but there is, and can only be, the most superficial resemblance between
the costly work of a bygone age and that of the present era.
A partial knowledge of these things has led some writers to describe
this manufacture as a “doomed industry”; but, like so many “doomed”
people, institutions, and trades, it maintains an astonishing vitality,
and there is probably more Tunbridge ware made now than in the times
when an article cost twice as much.
[Illustration: TUNBRIDGE WARE.]
The methods employed are of some interest. Radiating, star-like
patterns are produced ingeniously by building up in long sticks
glued together around a central core, afterwards to be sawn off in
veneer-like strips: a hundred to a stick. These are then mounted on
to the articles to be decorated. In the case of more ambitious and
pictorial efforts, such as a view of the Pantiles (a favourite subject)
in coloured woods, the craftsman works to a coloured sketch, divided
up like a Berlin wool pattern. In such cases the little wooden cubes
are of necessity extremely minute. Mounted on to the wooden surface of
workbox or other article, the work has then to undergo many sandpaper
scrubbings, with sandpaper of increasing fineness, and is at last
polished to an exquisite finish.
To the true artistic eye these ingenious imitations of drawings or
paintings scarcely commend themselves, and Tunbridge ware finds its
best exposition in the boxes inlaid with squares of various woods, in
which you can see the grain and colour natural to each.
Great expense and care were formerly taken to secure beautiful
varieties of wood, and no fewer than eighty, English and foreign, were
in constant use. It was found that no wood naturally gave green or
silver-grey, and it was therefore necessary to procure those colours
artificially. Green was obtained from “decayed oak,” the fallen boughs
of oak-trees stained green by fungoid growths. To get grey, bird’s-eye
maple and Hungarian ash were steeped in the chalybeate waters of “the
wells”; and a beautiful white was produced by boiling holly.
XXVIII
The fine upland Common of Tunbridge Wells is one of the town’s greatest
assets. Extraordinary outcrops of rock occur on it, and away to where
it merges into Rusthall Common is that bourne of many a pilgrimage—the
famous Toad Rock: an immense mass of sandstone really very like a toad
squatting on its haunches, and not by any means of so uncertain a
shape as that of so many of those queer rocks in which you see just
what you please, like Hamlet’s cloud, “almost in shape of a camel,”
“like a weasel,” and finally “very like a whale.” The Toad Rock has not
so many imaginary incarnations, and looks only like a toad. In these
days it has been found necessary to protect it with a defensive iron
railing, but this precaution has not served to exclude the usual fools
who carve their folly deeply into everything capable of being marked
with a penknife.
[Illustration: THE TOAD ROCK.]
The natural gorge close by, known as Gibraltar Rocks, still is marked
by one of the houses built on the Common by a sentimental English
Government for the French priests exiled from France at the Revolution.
In addition, the Government made them an allowance for their
maintenance.
The population of Rusthall, to judge from the language and behaviour
of its boys and young men, must be in a very primitive stage of
civilisation. The stupid foulness and vileness of their conduct in the
neighbourhood of that public resort, the Toad Rock, any day and every
day deserve the attention of the police.
[Illustration: SCENE AT “HIGH ROCKS.”]
Tunbridge Wells is a neighbourhood of rocks, but none others approach
the weird scene at the spot appropriately called High Rocks, less than
two miles distant, on the way to Groombridge. It is _not_ the “Finest
Scenery in England,” as claimed by Mr. Thomas Coster, proprietor of the
“High Rocks Hotel,” who charges sixpence to enter; but it is highly
curious. Many ingenious and enterprising sightseers, chiefly active
cyclists, resenting the being clicked through a turnstile at sixpence
a head, take Mr. Coster and his encircling fences in the rear, and,
entering a little wood, insinuate themselves into his domain and see
his rocks for nothing. His rocks! On the whole, their enterprise has
my respectful admiration, for it seems absurd to treat Nature as if
she had made this scene in the infancy of the world for the purpose of
providing a showman with an income.
The writer of a guide-book published in 1810 describes the “High
Rocks” as “romantic scenery,” and says that, “combining with the wish
to please and be pleased,” the spot “tended to create an agreeable
relief to that tædium which will frequently encroach on a place of
public resort.” There is a specious plausibility about this which leads
the reader at first to idly agree; but the muzziness of thought and
woolliness of expression very soon lead one to the opinion that the
writer, although he may have had an inkling of what he meant when he
set out, very soon lost himself on the way.
[Illustration: THE MARQUIS OF ABERGAVENNY’S “A.”]
The High Rocks cover a space of about two acres, and consist of a great
wooded bluff hanging, cliff-like, over the road, and intersected in
innumerable directions with fissures, gullies, and ravines from fifty
to seventy feet deep. These ravines are crossed by numerous wooden
bridges, and ascended or descended by rustic stairs. There is the Bell
Rock, which gives forth a metallic sound when struck; the Warning Rock,
and all sorts of other rocks, fantastically named; and there are swings
and brake-loads of excursionists, and mazes. Altogether, the place is
pretty well exploited, and the penknife has been busy on every spot
within reach.
[Illustration: THE NEVILLE GATE, FRANT.]
A way to Hastings by Tunbridge Wells lay in coaching days through
Frant, Wadhurst, and Ticehurst, emerging upon the direct road again at
Stone Crouch. It is a wildly beautiful wooded district, passing through
a line of country where an immense upholstered letter A is noticeable
on almost every cottage, sometimes in company with the Neville
portcullis, indicating the ownership of the Marquis of Abergavenny in
the country-side. Near Frant an extraordinary gateway into the park of
Eridge abuts upon the wayside, flanked by his Bull’s Head crest and
adorned with the punning motto, _Ne vile celis_: “Wish nothing base.” A
proud motto, woefully smirched by Lord William Neville in recent years,
when he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment for forgery.
XXIX
The main road is more quickly regained at Pembury Green, where the last
suburbs of Tunbridge Wells end.
Pembury Green is an old hamlet reared in modern times up to the status
of a separate parish, with a tall-spired church built where it has no
business to be—on the green that gives the place its distinguishing
name. There are plenteous evidences, in the number of inns and
Cyclists’ Rests, that Pembury Green is a favourite resort in the long
days of summer.
The number of refreshment places along the Hastings Road catering for
cyclists is more marked than even on that very much exploited highway,
the road to Brighton. Perhaps on a road so hilly as this those pushers
of the reluctant pedal require more frequent halts and more sustenance.
Most wayside inns nowadays express their readiness to entertain
wheelmen by exhibiting the modest announcement, “Accommodation for
Cyclists,” hinged on to their old signs; but, apart from these, the
keeping of “Cyclists’ Rests” along the main roads has become an
industry as congested as the close professions.
The natural history of Cyclists’ Rests affords interest to the
peripatetic philosopher. They range from the cheap boudoir-like kind, a
couple or so miles out from a town, where the articles most in demand
are weak tea and hairpins, down to the sometimes bare, sometimes grubby
little dens in remoter places, labelled in illiterate fashion,
“CYCLIƧT REƧT”
designed to suit the shallow pockets of the long-distance-riding club
cyclist; where, in discomfort, you eat off delf plates laid on tables
covered with slimy “American cloth,” and get a good “blow-out” and a
shakedown in an attic with precipitous floor and sloping roof for an
incredibly small sum.
The first variety are fully furnished for feminine cyclists with
materials for tea, with the hairpins already mentioned, with
chocolates, a carafe of weary-looking home-made lemonade with a lemon
stuck in the neck of it, the usual fizzy “minerals,” and sixpennyworth
of buns. Wonders may be wrought on a basis so slight.
The other kind is of sterner stuff. Who rides far must feed well. Tea
for the hard rider, no less than for the ambling lady cyclist, is
essential, but it must be tea with a tang to it, and plenty of it; and
it gets mixed, in course of feeding, with such meats as the “Rest”
affords, with the result—a medical expert would say—that the interior
of that cyclist is converted into a tannery, and his food turned to
leather by the tannic acid of his drink. And yet I never heard of a
healthy, active cyclist being inconvenienced, much less laid low, by
such immoral feeding.
[Illustration: THE “BLUE BOYS” INN.]
It is a solitary road beyond Pembury Green, varied only by a few
scattered houses, all the way to Lamberhurst. Kipping’s Cross is the
first of these intervals, and there stands the “Blue Boys” inn, with an
oast-house for only neighbour. The “Blue Boys” is practically dated by
its odd picture sign, showing two blue-jacketed postboys shaking hands
and lifting each a convivial glass, whether to their noble selves or to
George the Fourth, whose medallion portrait is below, cannot be said.
Beyond the inn is the cross-road leading to Goudhurst, scene of
many incidents in the history of smuggling. Between this point and
Lamberhurst, four miles distant, there were, in the once-upon-a-time of
coaching days, two turnpike-gates. The pikeman’s house remains at both
places.
The level tract of land at this point was known to old road-books as
“Lindridge Causeway,” and owed its name, according to John Harris, who
wrote a “History of Kent” in 1719, to one Lindridge, who was born in
1560, lived in a house adjacent to Lamberhurst, and “built a handsome
causeway here, called after him.” At that time there was still a stone
to his memory in the porch of Lamberhurst church.
The name of “Lamberhurst Quarter,” given to the district on this
hill-top above Lamberhurst village, is one of those many mysteries of
place-names that now can never be authoritatively explained; but it is
supposed to derive from some ancient partition of the manor into four
parts—quarters of a knight’s fee.
Down below, on the right hand, are spread out the many-serried ranks of
the hop-gardens. You look down upon them as a commanding officer might
upon his phalanxed battalions.
XXX
Hops are grown in the neighbourhood of Lamberhurst almost as
extensively as around Maidstone itself, which every one knows to be
the metropolis of the cultivation. The hop-gardens are the vineyards
of England, and so marked a feature that it surprises the inquirer who
learns that the brewer’s hop was not introduced to this country until
the reign of Henry the Eighth. “Hops and heresy came in together,” the
Roman Catholics were wont to remark.
There is no certainty about hops, and a hop-grower will readily admit
that his trade is little better than gambling. Knowledge, capital,
industry are all insufficient to arm him against fate in the shape of
red spider, mould, fly, or bad markets, and he is commonly content if
he can secure one good crop at average prices in three years. It is a
costly cultivation, coming, with rent, rates, taxes, materials, and
labour, to an average of £25 per acre.
Only land “just so” will serve. A little too heavy, a little too
light, or not being drained to perfection, will spell failure, and a
hop-garden must be drained, with pipes or tiles, at least as well as a
house.
The hop-grower’s year begins in March, when the “hills,” or stools,
are uncovered and dressed by pruning. Then the poles are set up: from
two to four to each “hill.” The “hills” being six feet apart, it is
a simple calculation to arrive at the number of poles to the acre.
There are 3,600, forming a considerable item in the grower’s accounts.
Made of ash, alder, chestnut, larch, or oak, of from ten to twelve
years’ growth, the great and constant demand for them has given their
characteristic appearance to large tracts of land in Kent and Sussex,
where the young woodlands are as much a feature as the hop-gardens and
the oast-houses themselves. Poles are from thirteen to fourteen feet
long, and cost from twelve shillings to a guinea a hundred, larch being
the most lasting. To preserve them as long as possible, they are often
dipped in creosote.
Early in May the hop-gardens begin to give employment to the women. The
young shoots are tied with rushes to the poles, and constantly thinned
out, and the poles themselves tied together with a maze of interlacing
string for the support of the climbing bine.
All through the summer the alleys between the plants must be kept well
weeded, and only when August ends does the grower begin to see his
reward in sight; but then rain may bring the “mould,” or the “fly”
may come, and all his toil be wasted. Only one thing will cure the
“fly,” and that is something utterly beyond control—the coming of the
“ladybird.”
Most people know the ladybird or “lady-cow,” as it is sometimes called:
the little winged insect with the hard shell of a post-office red,
subject of the old rustic rhyme, in which, placing it on the tip of the
finger, it would be addressed in this wise:
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home:
Your house is all burnt, and your children all gone.
Little pop-pop sits on the cold stone,
Crying for mammy, and mammy don’t come.
I heard that rhyme very early, and shall never quite lose the forlorn
sense of tragedy in it.
The ladybird is the deadly foe of the “fly,” and seems by some
extraordinary instinct to know when and where that pest is rampant;
for there is nothing more certain than that a plague of “fly” will be
followed by an incursion of ladybirds in countless millions, coming
even across the Channel, as steamboat passengers, plentifully covered
with them, have testified. The sky rains ladybirds, come vengefully
to exterminate the hop-grower’s enemy and to ensure that British beer
shall be properly bittered.
If the hops survive all these dangers and chances and are a generally
abundant crop, the grower is sometimes in almost as bad a case as if
they had been a failure, for prices then rule so ruinously low that
they do not pay the cost of growing. Hops have been so high as £25 a
hundredweight in times of scarcity, when those fortunate enough to be
favoured with a good crop, while their neighbours’ were failures, have
retired with fortunes. On the other hand, they have been so low as
fifty shillings.
A less anxious, but infinitely more busy time has come when the picking
arrives. Responsible gangers have to be employed, and hop-cutters. The
hop-cutter cuts through the bines, pulls up the poles, and lays them
across the bins of sacking into which the pickers strip the flowers
of the hop. The ganger measures out the stripped hops, and in his
note-book credits each picker with the amount of his picking, at the
rate of eight bushels a shilling.
The hopper’s hut is not the last word in convenience, although for
the occasion, and by way of change from the hopper’s native slum, it
may be comfortable enough. It is usually one of a long row of little
brick dens, not altogether unlike some of the wild animals’ lairs at
the Zoological Gardens, and is whitewashed inside in the manner of a
cattle-pen. There are—is it necessary to add?—no pictures on the walls
and no domestic knick-knacks. There is not even any furniture, nor a
bed. If you are a hopper you doss on the floor, luxuriating in clean
straw provided by the hop-grower, and wrapped in the not over-clean
blankets brought by yourself; and you and yours “clean yourselves”—in
these circles you do not merely “wash”—in the open, at buckets and
tins. In the open, too, you dress and get shaved, and cook and eat; and
if the August and September days be kind, there is enjoyment rather
than discomfort in it. Sometimes barns and tents supplement the huts:
sometimes, too, it rains, and then, on a really wet day, when work is
at a standstill and the women and the children are miserable and sulky
and cry, the male hopper—who, although as a rule he uses dreadful
language, is not a bad fellow at heart—goes off to the nearest pub. and
soaks on four-ale, and there is trouble.
[Illustration: KENT.]
There are, every year, some 50,000 hop-pickers, picking from 35,000
to 40,000 acres of hop-gardens. Of these the larger proportion is
contributed by the villagers; but the railways convey about 20,000
from London by the “hopper specials” at very low rates, and many, who
cannot afford even those very cheap fares, tramp down.
The special trains would make the patrons of the Continental expresses
stare. They set out at midnight, or thereabouts, and are filled with a
motley crowd, bringing mattresses, blankets, frying-pans, kettles, and
a host of small domestic requirements for a fortnight or three weeks.
They book to whatever station they fancy as the likeliest point whence
to seek a job; for while some hop-pickers, during a steady succession
of years, know where they will be welcome, many of them go on sheer
speculation, and tramp from village to village until they find
vacancies. In later years, and in bad or wet seasons, the number of
the unsuccessful claiming admission at the casual wards, especially
at Maidstone, has seriously embarrassed the workhouse authorities and
those good folk who not only missionise the hoppers with Bible and
Prayer Book, but feed and clothe their bodies in this world as well as
showing anxiety for their souls in the next.
Hop-picking is for many poor Londoners the only holiday they get
throughout the year. It is that best of holidays, change of work and
of scene. Its chief merits are that it requires no skill, and that
the whole family can take part in it, except the baby, who is at any
rate brought into the hop-garden to look on, and left to amuse himself
or to sleep under an umbrella, while grandfather, grandmother,
father, mother, uncles and aunts, and brothers and sisters are all
busily filling the bins and earning, according to their degrees of
“slippiness,” a shilling to two shillings the day.
Each hop-grower is his own dryer: hence the kilns, the strangely
cowled “oast-houses” attached to every hop-garden. To these the hops
are taken, to be dried. Most oast-houses are circular, that form being
considered to distribute the heat more evenly than the square. The
interior is instructive, and would not be at all unwelcome on one of
those wet and chilly days that are not unknown to the English summer,
were it not for the universal practice of mixing sulphur with the coke
fires, which, to a stranger, results in an inconvenient hoarseness and
sore throat. The reason for the sulphur is that the fumes it throws
off give a yellowish colour to the dried hops, a tint conventionally
required by the factors, although it makes them neither better nor
worse.
The fires are on the ground level. Above, the hops are spread on the
drying-floor, formed of wire-netting, covered with hair-cloth. Through
this the warm air ascends, and in twelve hours some 1,050 lb. weight
of hops are dried, and incidentally reduced by the evaporation of the
moisture in them to 200 lb. The heat ascends and leaves the oast-house
by the cowl, which turns on bearings, according to the direction of the
wind.
From the drying-floor to the cooling-floor the hops are transferred
with a wooden shovel, and then packed into the “pockets.” “Pockets”
are sacks, and are nowadays filled by being suspended from a hole in
the floor, and filled with the light feathery dried hops; and then
repeatedly pressed down, re-filled and re-pressed by a heavy iron
screw-press. In the result, a pocket of hops is as hard and unyielding
to the touch as a mass of iron, and samples cut from it hold together
like so much cake-tobacco. The older method of packing was for a
“jumper” to press the hops down by his own unaided efforts.
XXXI
Those who would find Lamberhurst church must diligently seek it,
for it lies quite away from the village, on the hill-top, beside
the manor-house, which you approach past a long line of pyramidical
yew-trees, so like those of toy Noah’s Arks that you look instinctively
for their wooden stands.
Like most manor-houses in Kent, this is styled the “Court Lodge.” The
Court Lodge itself is a stone building of considerable age, with the
desolating gaunt exterior of a workhouse; and the church, standing
behind it, is in appearance—and in some sort in fact—an appanage of the
lord of the manor, for it stands, with the residence, in the middle of
his park.
It is a very charming old church, with a shingled spire, and deeply
embowered in dark heavy trees, as though Nature herself had put on a
solemn mood, in deference to the spirit of the place. Most prominent in
the approach is a fine eighteenth-century monument, like a tea-caddy,
with an epitaph starting off suddenly in this wise:
Virgil Pomfret, Gent
Liv^d so Respected
That when the Sable Train of Mourning Friends
Attended his breathless Corps
Here to be Entomb^d
Each tear ful Eye seem’d thus to Say
There Goes an Honest Man
1765 Aged 77
This is followed by an inscription stating how Virgil Pomfret’s wife
was “Virtuous and Discreet,” and this by another that tells us how, in
the same year, Virgil Pomfret, junior, was “snatch’d away By the Small
Pox,” aged 28.
I think it gives that dreadful disease an added terror to personify it
in this larcenous way.
At the foot of the hill lies quiet, beautiful Lamberhurst. Mr. Rudyard
Kipling has not inaptly named it “Slumberhurst,” and Cobbett, not given
to indiscriminate praise, spoke of it as “a very pretty place, lying in
a valley with beautiful hills round it.”
Old writers gave it as their opinion that the place-name came from “the
Anglo-Saxon _Lam_, meaning ‘loam,’” and supported their contention by
referring to the sticky clay of the neighbourhood; but Lamberhurst
probably took the first part of its name from the Saxon genitive
plural for lambs. The second part means, of course, a wood. Most
surrounding places take their names, in this manner, from natural
objects.
[Illustration: LAMBERHURST.]
Kent and Sussex here march together, and the village was, until 1894,
in both counties, the dividing-line being the little river Teise that
flows under the picturesque and narrow bridge in the village street.
In that year, however, Lamberhurst was transferred wholly to Kent. The
old “Chequers” inn, type of an old English hostelry, has lately been
neighboured by an upstart hotel, disturbing with its raw newness the
ancient peace of this Sleepy Hollow.
It was once a busy enough place, and black and smoky, for close by
were the famous furnaces, or “bloomeries,” where iron-ore was smelted
and cannon cast, and where the famous iron railings that now partly,
and once wholly, surrounded St. Paul’s Cathedral, were made. Great
outcry was made when the railings were removed from the west front of
the cathedral in 1873, but we need not lack in admiration of them to
realise that the open space thus created is a better sight than the
strictly enclosed approach to London’s chief place of worship. The
railings originally weighed 200 tons, cost £11,202, and were considered
to be the finest, as they certainly were the heaviest, in the world.
The site of the furnace is half a mile from Lamberhurst, on the way to
Bayham Abbey. It is distinguished by a hammer-pond and a mouldy old
house almost smothered in trees and creepers.
[Illustration: BAYHAM ABBEY: ACROSS THE WATER-MEADOWS.]
Along the valley of the stream that feeds this pond lie the ruins of
Bayham Abbey, a remote home of Premonstratensian Canons, whose simple
life was to the last in great contrast with the dissolute conduct of
the great majority of the religious houses rightly abolished in the
time of Henry the Eighth. But they had to suffer for the sins of the
many, and although a crowd of rustics and others of better estate
assembled in disguise and reinstated the canons, after they had been
expelled by the Commissioners, it was only a temporary victory. Abbey
and estates fell to Sir Anthony Browne, of whom we shall hear more at
Battle; but what became of the wonderful bed upon which the blessed
St. Richard of Chichester had slept, history sayeth not. It should
have been presented to the most deserving hospital, for it wrought
cures upon all who slept in it, no matter what the disease. But the Age
of Faith was past, and the Blessed Bed was doubtless chopped up for
firewood and its bedding dispersed: an inestimable loss to an ailing
world. Imagine a bed sovran for every ill! How compute the value of it?
If the curse upon sacrilege were not such a chancy and fortuitous
thing, one might look confidently for terrible happenings to the owners
of the Bayham Abbey lands, the Pratts, Marquises Camden, who bought the
estates from Viscount Montagu in 1714. But their elephant’s-head crest
remains on all the cottages for miles around, and they continue to
“live long and brosber.”
The ruins are visible from the road, lying amid rich water-meadows, and
they are to be seen more intimately at the end of a phenomenally muddy
lane. But you may not view them from within the enclosure except on one
day of the week and at a fee of sixpence.
XXXII
Restrictions upon sight-seeing in this neighbourhood are particularly
severe. On the rising ground out of Lamberhurst, for example, lies
Scotney Castle, a lovely, sequestered ruin partly surrounded by a
great, lake-like moat, and only a little less romantic than Bodiam
itself. To reach it you go past a very modern lodge and along a
half-mile of wooded drive, chiefly of laurels and sweet chestnuts. But
permission is granted on only one day of the week, doubtless in the
hope that the precise day will not be remembered. On any summer’s day
numerous vehicles and parties, some of them come from long distances,
may be seen turned back by the lodge-keeper.
Scotney was ever the home of romance, for one of its earliest owners,
Walter de Scotney, was executed at Winchester in 1259 for administering
poison to the Earl of Gloucester and others. The humour of it is that
Walter de Scotney was probably quite innocent. The Earl recovered,
but his brother, William de Clare, died, as also did the Abbot of
Westminster. The Earl himself seems to have had a narrow escape, for
he lost hair, nails, teeth, and skin, and must have been one vast
comprehensive ache, and in a more painful condition than that of a
chicken plucked alive.
Scotney then passed to the Darrells, who led a finely dramatic life
here until they ended, to an effective and tragical “curtain.”
The old castle lies in a watery hollow beneath the modern Gothic
mansion, and itself consists of two distinct portions: the castellated
building erected about 1418 by Archbishop Chicheley, and the later
manor-house of the Darrells, who in Queen Elizabeth’s time were Roman
Catholics, maintaining their religion and its observances in spite of
the laws, ordinances, and penalties levelled against Papist recusants.
[Illustration: SCOTNEY CASTLE.]
To secure their officiating priests against arrest the Darrells
contrived a highly ingenious hiding-hole in their mansion, and it was
speedily found useful. It was the Christmas night of 1598, towards
the end of Elizabeth’s long reign, and Father Blount, a well-known and
keenly sought priest, was in the house with his servant when the party
were surprised by a search-expedition, who, having got wind of Blount’s
presence, were bent on capturing him.
While the enemy were demanding admittance, Blount and his servant were
hurried into the courtyard, where a huge stone in the wall, turning
upon a pivot, gave entrance to the hiding-place. Unluckily for them,
a portion of a girdle-strap was caught between the stone and the rest
of the wall, and showed plainly. Meanwhile the search-party had been
admitted, and, securing the inmates of the house in one room, proceeded
to search the place.
While they were thus engaged an outside servant of the family chanced
to see the girdle, and promptly cut it off, calling as loudly as he
dared to the fugitives to pull in the fragment that was still visible.
The sharp-eared search-party, hearing a voice in the courtyard, rushed
out and sounded the walls all round, without making any discovery, but
kept it up until the rain, which had set in, disgusted them, when they
retired, intending to resume the search on the morrow.
As Blount’s own record of the adventure tells us, he and his servant
were concealed for days under a staircase. At last, afraid to risk the
result of another day’s proceedings, they escaped under cover of night.
Barefooted they crossed the courtyard, climbed the walls and swam the
moat, then covered with thin ice. They did well to fly, for next day
their hiding-place was discovered.
In later years the castle and manor-house, by that time ruined, was the
haunt of smugglers, among whom the Darrells themselves were reputed
to be prominent. To-day the beautiful spot is surrounded not only by
the moat, but by exquisite gardens. The two remaining towers of the
mediæval castle rise picturesquely from the still waters, and within
the wreck of the Elizabethan mansion there are rooms contrived for the
gamekeeper.
XXXIII
Weird oast-houses of a gigantic size raise their lofty cowls against
the sky-line outside Lamberhurst, and, with their vanes decorated with
images of the Kentish Horse, look like the architecture of Nightmare.
Half a mile onwards, an old toll-house, added to in later years, has
the appearance of a lodge. Beyond it, the road has at some distant
period been raised from a very deep dingle, as may be judged from the
farm in the neighbouring hollow, and from the Bewl Bridge, under whose
arch the little Bewl stream rushes, with a hoarse voice, far below.
[Illustration: WEIRD OAST-HOUSES, LAMBERHURST.]
In another mile is Stone Crouch, whose name of “crouch,” meaning merely
a cross—probably a cross-road—prepares one for that most solitary
and most rustic hamlet, with a farmhouse and its dependent cottages and
barns, all in the old Kentish style. The farmhouse was once a coaching
inn, and appears to have borne the sign of the “Postboy,” now taken by
a house on the way from Lamberhurst, half a mile before the hamlet is
reached.
On the left is the great park of Bedgebury, the seat until 1887, when
he died, of A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, once prominent in the House of
Commons. He was the descendant of one John Hope, a Hollander, of
Amsterdam, whose son settled in England about 1800. That origin was
the subject of a curious allusion in Parliament, during the debate of
April 12th, 1867, on the Representation of the People Bill: a measure
vehemently opposed by Beresford-Hope, whose clumsy, burly form and
grotesque mannerisms in speaking were often commented upon. He spoke
with emphasis of voice and gesture against that proposal of Disraeli’s,
and declared, rather offensively, that he “would vote with whole heart
and conscience against the Asian mystery.”
To this the “Asian mystery” himself rejoined that “all the honourable
member’s exhibitions in the House are distinguished by a prudery which
charms me, and when he talks of Asian mysteries, I may, perhaps, by way
of reply, remark that there is a Batavian grace about his exhibition
which takes the sting out of what he has said.”
He might even have said batrachian grace, for Beresford-Hope on his
legs in the House was something froglike.
The house at Bedgebury, originally built in 1688 by Sir James Hayes,
from sources romantically drawn out of treasure recovered from a sunken
Spanish galleon, has been twice remodelled, lastly in the ’60’s, and is
typical of the taste then prevailing for French architecture of what we
may term the Alexandra Palace, Grosvenor Place, and Buckingham Palace
Hotel type: which is to a Londoner an easier method of comparison
than by naming it the “Louis the Fourteenth style.” It is a type
distinguished by scaly Mansard roofs and spiky crestings, and has long
been outmoded.
Beresford-Hope was a connoisseur of sorts, with a ready purse for
church-restoration, conducted sometimes with that “zeal not according
to knowledge” St. Paul laments, and exemplified in the little church of
Kilndown, outside Bedgebury Park.
At Flimwell, which is merely a hamlet at the cross-roads, formed into
a parish in 1839 by annexing portions of the neighbouring parishes
of Etchingham, Ticehurst, and Hawkhurst, the road finally enters
Sussex. “Flimwell Vent” is the style by which the place is known to
old Turnpike Acts. The name sounds mysterious, but is only a strangely
perverted version of “went,” the old rustic word for a cross-road.
This, where roads go in four different directions, would be a
“four-went way.” The draughtsmen who drew up those acts simply did not
understand the term, and spelled it, as Mr. Tony Weller did his name,
with a “we.”
The place is not unknown to history. In 1265, Henry the Third having,
after a short siege, seized Tonbridge Castle, marched south, and,
passing Combwell, a nunnery in the parish of Goudhurst, found the dead
body of his cook, Master Thomas, who had incautiously strayed from the
main body. According to contemporary records, the enraged King ordered
three hundred and fifteen archers to be beheaded “at the place which is
called Flimerwelle,” and here accordingly “they were surrounded like so
many innocent lambs in a field, and butchered.”
The Angevin kings had no sense of proportion, and a perverted one of
justice.
The left-hand road at Flimwell is the way to Rye, leading over what
was once the wild and lonely region of Seacox Heath, haunt of the
desperate smugglers then infesting this part of the country. The heath
is now a thing of the past. Enclosure and farming have abolished it,
and perhaps the only fragment of it left is a delightful little patch
of brilliant heather preserved in the gardens of Lord Goschen’s mansion
of “Seacox Heath.” Portions remain of old buildings once belonging to
a house traditionally said to have been used as a warehouse by the
half-mythical smuggler, Arthur Grey, but the present house was built
in 1871 by Mr. (afterwards Lord) Goschen. It is a rather severe and
formal Renaissance building, in a pale yellow sandstone quarried on
the estate, and defies the canons of proportion suited to a country
house, running to height rather than ground-space—a fashion imposed in
streets where houses are built shoulder to shoulder, but unnecessary
and undesirable on sites such as this.
It is a beautiful site; a lofty ridge facing south and overlooking many
miles of lovely country. Ornate gardens, in which the most brilliant
flowers predominate, surround the house, and beyond them are dense
plantations of the choicest conifers, collected from all parts of the
world.
Between Flimwell and Hastings, a distance of 18¾ miles, there were no
fewer than six turnpike-gates levying tribute upon road-users, but
in spite of these heavy exactions—perhaps even because of them—the
expenditure of the Flimwell and Hastings Turnpike Trust largely
exceeded its income, and in 1835 it was £11,000 in debt. In the end
Parliament abolished turnpikes, and the bondholders who had lent money
on the security of the tolls and the good faith of the Government lost
their capital, not only here but all over the country.
A farmhouse one mile on the road beyond Flimwell, with brick-and-tile
front and weather-boarded back, and with oast-houses and hop-gardens
attached to it, is known, for some inscrutable reason, as “Mountpumps.”
In another two miles the road comes to Hurst (_i.e._ Wood) Green.
XXXIV
Hurst Green is a large hamlet, and an offshoot of Etchingham; created
by the road travel of the last hundred years. It is in two most
distinct parts: one unmistakably Georgian, the other just as distinctly
Late Victorian, shading off into Early Edwardian. Although one
continuous street, divided only by a cross-road, the two parts of Hurst
Green are very different in appearance, and look so antagonistic that
it would not be surprising to learn that the inhabitants of either will
have no dealings with those of the other.
The traveller comes first to the more recent portion: very red and
raw, and there he finds a reason for much of these developments, in a
large and highly ornate Police-station, which is not merely that, but
a Court-house as well. Hurst Green, it seems, is the headquarters of a
Petty Sessional division of the county of Sussex: much to the advantage
of the great neighbouring “George” inn and its rival over the way,
the “Queen’s Head.” When the railway came, and the custom fell off
and the great stables were deserted, the two old inns were in grave
danger of extinction. Only the Petty Sessions saved the situation.
To-day, when the awful majesty of the Bench has dealt with the crimes
and misdemeanours of the district—awarding fine or imprisonment for
poaching or the juvenile rifling of orchards—the upholders of law
and order and the rights of property in ground-game adjourn for
refreshment, and in the “George” drink confusion to the illegal
midnight sportsman and the youthful apple-stealers, while the friends
and relations of those hardened criminals drown their sorrows at the
“Queen’s Head.”
[Illustration: ETCHINGHAM CHURCH.]
Although the call of nature may be attended to, and thirst and hunger
handsomely appeased at Hurst Green, the æsthetic sense is unlikely to
be full fed. Satisfaction of that kind—but none of the other—is amply
obtained at Etchingham, one mile distant, down a bye-road.
Travellers to and from Hastings by South Eastern Railway are familiar
with Etchingham, as a place with a station where no train appears ever
to stop; and indeed to the ordinary mind there seems, not merely no
reason for stopping, but none for a station at all. For Etchingham
is just what you see from the passing train: a great, impressive
church, and one or two ancient farmsteads. There was no village when
the station was built, in 1847, and the place was, except for that
beautiful church and those farms, a solitude. A solitude, too, it
remained until 1904, when an entirely new village was begun. There it
blooms to-day, in red brick, like a scarlet geranium, and the South
Eastern Railway is at last, after close upon two generations, justified
of its prescience.
There seems never to have been a village at Etchingham. Only a
manor-house of the de Etchinghams; and that disappeared so long ago
that little is known of it. Its last traces were erased when the
railway came, and the station stands on the site. There is something so
typical of the age in that circumstance that one cannot but stand and
admire the dramatic completeness, the colossal audacity of it.
But a something greater than the manor-house of those ancient lords
remains; in the great church they built. It stands so near the railway
that one might pitch a stone from the train into the churchyard; and,
as it is one of the finest churches in Sussex, it never fails to hold
the glance of those who pass this way. It was built, on the site of
an earlier, by Sir William de Etchingham, in 1365, and is a cruciform
building, with massive central tower, in the Late Decorated style—that
large and bold phase of Gothic which comes between Early English and
Perpendicular, and looks lovingly back upon the grace of the earlier
and forward to the lofty emptiness of the later, with a richness of
detail peculiar to itself. A special note of this church is the fine
tracery of its east window, in the easy flowing style, common in France
but comparatively rare in this country, known as Flamboyant. The low
pyramidical spire of the tower still supports the original copper
weathervane, in the form of a banneret displaying the fretty coat of
arms of the de Etchinghams, and on the floor of the chancel are the
almost life-sized figures, in engraved brass, of the founder himself,
and his son and grandson. Sir William, the builder of the church, died
in 1387. He still darkly, in obscure Norman-French and black-letter,
begs the prayers of all: “I was made and formed of Earth; and now have
I returned to Earth. William de Etchingham was my name. God have pity
on my soul; and all you who pass by, pray to Him for me.”
[Illustration: THE ANCIENT VANE, ETCHINGHAM.]
If salvation be found in church-building—and there are yet those who
seek it that way—then, in those many mansions beyond, William de
Etchingham is well-housed, for he built not only a large church, but a
beautiful.
He endowed it, too, and the eighteen carved miserere stalls yet remain
where the priests sang their office. If you turn up those hinged seats,
you will find odd carvings on the under side; among them the biting
satire, disloyal in such a place, of the fox in the habit of a priest,
preaching to geese.
[Illustration: BRASS OF SIR WILLIAM DE ETCHINGHAM.]
A tablet on the wall records in Latin that the chancel was restored
at the expense of the rector, Dr. Hugh Totty, who died, aged 101, in
1857. In the south aisle hangs a tilting-helmet and the erminois banner
of Sir George Strode; and a mural monument to Henry Corbould, artist
and ancestor of artists, who died, aged 57, in 1844, is a a shocking
example of “Gothic,” as understood towards the middle of the nineteenth
century. Even this, however, is not so bad as the tablet, with marble
profile portrait medallion, to one “John Snepp, gent,” 1823.
[Illustration: THE FOX PREACHING TO THE GEESE.]
The churchyard was once surrounded by a moat, in which, according to
an ancient legend, there lay a great bell. How it came there the story
did not say; but it was never to be drawn from its hiding-place until
six yoke of white oxen should be brought for the purpose. The moat was
drained long since; but legend was for once at fault, for no bell was
found.
XXXV
Returning to Hurst Green, and resisting the temptation to turn aside
for the purpose of seeing the farmhouse called “Squibs,” we come
presently to Silver Hill, an eminence described by Horace Walpole,
who in 1752 travelled Kent and Sussex with Mr. Chaloner Chute on
antiquarian pilgrimage:
“The roads grew bad beyond all badness, the night dark beyond all
darkness, our guide frightened beyond all frightfulness. However,
without being at all killed, we got up, or down—I forget which, it was
so dark—a famous precipice called Silver Hill, and about ten at night
arrived at a wretched village called Rotherbridge.”
He forgot which! That is—like the hill—rather steep. But he must have
known by the time they returned, for he speaks of the view from the
crest, on the homeward journey, as “the richest blue prospect you ever
saw.” It is indeed very beautiful, and the fact has been recognised by
some enthusiastic person who, in a field beside the road to the left,
has erected a tall staging, known as “The Beacon,” for sightseers.
The hill is steep: not too steep for a determined cyclist to ride up it
on the return, but still a very respectable gradient. It looks by no
means so terrible as Walpole’s description would prepare the stranger
for; but the roadway is, in fact, not that which gave these tourists
and their guide such qualms, for it was reconstructed about 1830.
Occasional lengths of deserted hollow road at the side are surviving
portions of the old road, and are quite steep and rugged enough to
acquit Walpole of unnecessary alarm.
Robertsbridge is a long, long village of old-fashioned houses huddled
together on either side of a narrow street in the flats that form the
valley of the Rother. Although Robertsbridge is so undeniably old it
is not an independent village, being in the parish of the much smaller
Salehurst, seen across the levels, a mile away.
It has never been determined whether Robertsbridge acquired its name
from Robert de Saint Martin, who founded the Cistercian Abbey “de Ponte
Roberti” here in 1176, or from a corrupted version of “Rotherbridge.”
“Much,” as Sir Roger de Coverley says in _The Spectator_, “might be
said on both sides.”
At any rate, it is unquestionably a place of bridges. There are
seven in all, in a line along the road; but no one of them is at all
considerable, and only three span any water, save in seasons of flood.
The beginning of the village, officially styled “Northbridge Street,”
is generally styled “the Bridges”; but was in turnpike days, when a
gate existed here, “the Clapper.”
The Abbey, long since demolished, lay one mile from the village, beside
the Rother. Fragments of it are picturesquely built into the Abbey
Farm, and serve as substantial walls for oast-houses. The most perfect
relic is the crypt, inside the house, forming an ideally cool dairy.
To this has come the Abbey that gave hospitality to Edward the First
and his successor; whose Abbot in 1193, in company with the Abbot of
Boxley, was of sufficient importance to be entrusted with the mission
of discovering the whereabouts on the Continent of the imprisoned
Richard Cœur de Lion. All that is left of it, beside these fragments,
is a manuscript volume in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, inscribed:
“This book belongs to St. Mary of Robertsbridge: whosoever shall steal
it or sell it, or in any way alienate it from this house, let him be
Anathema Maranatha.”
[Illustration: THE ABBEY FARM.]
Notwithstanding this comprehensive curse, some one did steal it. A
further inscription, written, it is thought, by John Grandison, Bishop
of Exeter, 1327-1369, declares: “I, John, Bishop of Exeter, know not
where the aforesaid house is; nor did I steal this book, but acquired
it in a lawful way.” It is quite surprising to find the old Churchmen
believing in the efficacy of their curses, and thus seeking to turn
them aside.
The site of the Abbey was granted by Henry the Eighth to Sir William
Sidney, and there are those who like to think that his grandson, Sir
Philip, would not have been killed at Zutphen, nor Algernon Sidney
beheaded, had it not been for the curse upon sacrilege, sleeping in one
generation to work woe in another.
For over one hundred and fifty years Robertsbridge Abbey was an iron
and steel foundry, where cannon and shot were cast. In the garden of
the farmstead a heap of cannon-balls, found about the premises, reminds
the visitor of this closed chapter.
When Horace Walpole and his companion, descending Silver Hill in
the dark, came to “the wretched village called Rotherbridge,” they
would have stayed the night, if they could have found any decent
accommodation. “But alas! there, was only one bed to be had. All the
rest were inhabited by smugglers, whom the people of the house called
‘mountebanks,’ and with one of whom the lady of the den told Mr. Chute
he might lie.” That was rather too much for Mr. Chute, who was a very
great person indeed when he was at home at his stately seat, “The
Vyne,” near Basingstoke, and he declined the fellowship.
So, with links and lanthorns, they continued their journey, and arrived
at Battle, hardly six miles away, at two o’clock in the morning, to a
“still worse” inn, “and that crammed with excise officers, one of whom
had just shot a smuggler. However, as we were neutral powers, we have
passed safely through both armies hitherto.”
One would like to identify that “den.” The term would scarcely apply to
the “George,” then, as now, the principal house, and a good specimen of
the old English inn, whose proprietor, according to an advertisement
in _The General Evening Post_ of 1784, when the house was to let, had
a “part-share” in the post-coach on the road to Hastings, described as
a “favourite place for sea-bathing.” Was it the “Seven Stars”? Or was
it not the “Stag’s Head” of other days, a shy-looking cottage lying low
down on the right of the “George,” and well remembered locally to have
been the haunt of the smugglers of Darvell Wood?
Robertsbridge is pure Sussex, and pronounces local place-names in a
manner peculiar to itself. In the result those names do not appear any
the more poetic—Udiham becoming “Udjem,” Bodiam “Bodjem,” Northiam
“Norjem,” and Horsmonden “Ors’nd’n.” The story is even told of a
stranger asking an inhabitant of Heathfield the way to that place, and
of that unlettered person for long declaring he had “niver ’eared of
sech a name in these parts.” At last a light broke in upon him. “You
means Efful,” he said.
Robertsbridge has now two railway-stations—that of the South Eastern,
opened in 1851, and a newer, on the Kent and East Sussex Light
Railway, recently made; but it is as old-fashioned as ever, and the
subject-matter of the inns at night is apt to be of such recollections
as that of how, seventy years ago, there were only three pairs of
top-boots in the parish, and how farmers going up to London to cut an
occasional dash would borrow them for the jaunt.
XXXVI
It would be unthinkable to leave Robertsbridge without visiting its
mother church of Salehurst; or, when there, to return without having
seen Bodiam Castle, two miles onward.
Salehurst Church stands picturesquely above the Rother, on the opposite
bank from the Abbey. On the north side of it there stands an aged
stone recording the incredible age of one “Peter Sparkes, who died
October 8th, 1683, aged 126 years.” He is referred to in the registers
of Wadhurst as “being above 126 years old by his own computation.”
Within the church there are several seventeenth-and eighteenth-century
cast-iron slabs to Peckhams and Stevens: relics of the forgotten
iron-founding industry of the district.
[Illustration: THE MOATED CASTLE OF BODIAM.]
The contemplative person, for whom antiquity is not everything,
who finds interest in things of the present as well as those of the
past, may discover some entertainment in noticing how exquisitely the
accommodation in the House of God shades off in fine distinctions,
from the cushioned seats and carpeted floors in front, to the strips
of carpet and the fibre matting of the intermediate, and lastly to the
bare seats and naked boards of those nearest the door—and the draughts.
He notices how things religious and things secular are all ordered
in these beautiful gradations: the three classes on railways, and
the more than three orders of seats in theatres; and he wonders—that
contemplative person—whether the “many mansions” prepared in the
Father’s house partake of the like subtleties.
The road to Bodiam—spelled “Bodiham” on old maps—is hilly and
circuitous; but it brings you at last to that tiny village overlooking
the Rother marshes, and to that castle which, more than any other
ancient fortress in England, figures the fairy home of the Sleeping
Beauty. Bodiam Castle stands on the hillside, beautifully rural, and is
surrounded by a very broad and very clear moat of running water, fed
from the never-failing springs that flow from the higher ground and are
dammed at this point. The grey and lichened walls of the castle rise
sheer from the water, amid a wealth of the loveliest water-lilies.
It is mediævalism incarnated. The walls and the eight towers,
alternately round and square, are almost perfect, and the wooden gate
yet hangs on its hinges across the bridge, where the portcullis grins
and the holes in the masonry remain above, to show how, by flinging
molten lead, boiling water, hot pitch, and domestic abominations upon
the heads of the enemy, the garrison were prepared to hold their own.
But history tells us nothing of sieges or conflicts here. Possibly
Sir Edward Dalyngruge, warrior of Crecy and Poictiers, who in the
fourteenth century built it, was too strong a castellan, and his moated
fortalice more than a thought too formidable. At any rate, it is a
castle without a story.
XXXVII
The story is still told at Robertsbridge, and with appropriate awe,
how a ploughman on Taylor’s Farm, Mountfield, ploughed up £1,100 worth
of gold, and sold it for five shillings, as old brass. That happened
so long ago as 1862 and the tale has lost nothing, since then, in the
re-telling. Mountfield was long a place of pilgrimage after that event,
and the ploughmen on its fields drove the share deeper than ever they
had done before; but if they made any more discoveries they were wise
enough to keep the fact to themselves.
Although it all happened so long ago, almost the first thing the
stranger hears of in Robertsbridge to this day is that mystic gold.
Reduced to plain facts, it seems that during his work in Barn Field,
on Taylor’s Farm, January 12th, 1862, a ploughman suddenly drove his
plough into an entangled mass of metal that brought him up with a
jerk. He threw the pieces on the baulk, and when his day’s work was
done showed them to his master, who thought they were brass, and gave
them to him. They were really, from the description afterwards given
of them, gold torques and other Early British ornaments, and had lain
there two thousand years. The metal weighed no less than thirteen
pounds.
After vainly endeavouring to sell the “old brass” to one dealer after
another, a Hastings man more wideawake than the rest, suspecting it
to be the more precious metal, gave the ploughman 6_d._ a pound for
it—liberal man! He lost no time in travelling to London, where he sold
it to a refiner, who melted it down and paid him £529 12_s._ 7_d._ for
the resultant 153 oz. 12 gr. of fine gold. A piece had already been
sold to a Hastings jeweller for £18.
Rumours of this extraordinary find soon spread, and in the end the
ploughman and the sharp dealer were arraigned at the Winter Sessions
at Lewes, December 1862, on the charge of illegally disposing of
treasure-trove, the property of Her Majesty the Queen. They were
each fined £265, half-value of the metal disposed of, or ordered to
be imprisoned until the money was paid. Fairy gold has ever brought
trouble upon those who find it.
It is useless to speculate upon the possible antiquarian value of the
ancient ornaments thus destroyed; but it must have been many times that
of the mere metal.
The other main staples of talk are cattle, hops, and wool. If you
cannot talk wool, hops, or cattle at Robertsbridge without some
knowledge of those subjects, you are self-condemned. There is a
fortnightly cattle-market; “ship” browse in many flocks on the
surrounding pastures, but everywhere are the hop-gardens and their
inseparable oast-houses.
XXXVIII
Out of Robertsbridge and the Rother valley the road ascends steeply
to John’s Cross, where the old coach-road bears to the left in
a circuitous route to Battle, by Vine Hall and Whatlington,
three-quarters of a mile longer than the absolutely straight modern
highway.
The “John’s Cross” inn, the old toll-house, and a few cottages sum up
the hamlet, and the rest of the way to Battle is of almost unbroken
loneliness, except for the railway level-crossing, mid-way.
If, before we come into the town of Battle, we re-read the stirring
story of the Norman invasion of 1066, and of the Battle of Senlac,
known more generally to the world as the Battle of Hastings, fought on
Saturday, October 14th, in that year, so fatal to English liberties,
on the spot where Battle Abbey stands,—if, I say, before approaching
Battle, we read anew the story of that history-making day of carnage,
we shall come into the quiet town with highly exalted feelings, and
shall find it a place of many and deep significances to us.
With the tale of that historic struggle thus freshened in our memories,
it is not merely the quiet little Sussex country town to which we now
come, but to the commanding hill of Senlac, overlooking the seven miles
of wooded lesser hills and vales by which the Norman host advanced from
Hastings.
The Norman invasion of England, the catastrophe of Senlac, and the woes
that then befell the English may all be traced to the weak character
and foolish policy of Edward the Confessor, a king whose reputation
for piety has, during all these intervening centuries, glozed over his
lack of the first qualities of kingship. Firm rule, wise and far-seeing
policy at home and abroad—those are the qualities, above all others,
we look for in a king, and mere saintliness of character in a ruler
has never yet, nor ever will, serve the turn of any nation. Edward the
Confessor has, time beyond the memory of man, been held up as a pattern
of all the virtues. We are told how he founded the Abbey of St. Peter,
which we now call Westminster Abbey, on Thorney Isle; we listen, with
what faith we may, to the story of how successfully he prayed away the
nightingales who were disturbing his orisons at Havering-atte-Bower.
We know that Rome, in the fulness of time, canonised him; but we know
also that, however fitted he was in life for the cloister, however
unaffected his piety, however mild and urbane his rule, certainly, from
the patriotic view-point, his _métier_ was not _d’être roi_, for he it
was who brought over the Normans to his court, and by his favours to
them showed them how desirable a country was this England.
Edward was, in short, a Normanised Englishman. The long years of exile
he had passed oversea in Normandy, before he was called upon to rule
over Saxon England, had set their seal upon him, and his favourite
courtiers were of Norman-French nationality. He had, certainly, married
Editha, daughter of the great Saxon Earl Godwin, and sister of Harold;
but his quarrels with her family go largely toward making up the story
of his reign. The head and front of his offending is undoubtedly the
alleged bequest, at a comparatively early period, of his crown to
William, Duke of Normandy. Apart from the fact that the succession was
not his to give, and would in any case have been the business of the
Witan, this devising of crown and country to an alien whose ways were
not those of the Saxons, and between whose people and Edward’s people
the keenest jealousy and animosity already existed, was unpatriotic
to the last degree; and had the “Confessor” been made to suffer the
terrible fate that befell the second Edward, himself the patron
of alien courtiers, that fate had been better deserved. Nay, were
justice done the memory of that traitor to his country, his shrine in
Westminster Abbey would be torn down and demolished.
But clearer and wiser views at last prevailed with the cloistered King,
and in that clarified and enlarged vision, he, drawing towards his
end, designated the Saxon Harold, his brother-in-law, his successor.
Wisdom, however, was vouchsafed him too late: the mischief was done.
The fates were working in those years against England and for Duke
William of Normandy, whom history knows, _ad nauseam_, as “William
the Conqueror.” That historic personage was a great captain, strong
in battle and in strategy, but he had also the mind of an attorney,
which could quirk you and quibble you, and chouse you as efficiently as
the sharpest practitioner that ever misused the law. It was no matter
to that acute and ambitious brain that the sanctimonious “Confessor”
had revoked his bequest in favour of Harold; to him, at least, it
held good. And events marvellously aided him. Somewhere about 1064,
Earl Harold, already king-designate, was voyaging down channel, when
his ships were driven ashore on the coast of Ponthieu, in territory
tributary to William. Those were times when to be cast ashore was to
suffer, not only the discomforts incidental to shipwreck, but to be
seized and held to ransom by the scarce more than robber-lords of that
age. Such an one was Count Guy of Ponthieu, who speedily seized Harold
and imprisoned him in his castle of Beaurain, and would have held him
there, over against the arrival of that ransom, had it not been for
the Duke, who, hearing of this odd freak of fate, and with a keen eye
to how the incident could be used to his own advantage, demanded his
release. But Harold’s enlargement from an acknowledged and undisguised
prison was merely an exchange for a gilded captivity. Nominally, he
was now become the guest of the Duke, in his palace at Rouen, but
in reality he was his prisoner, only to be released on terms. Those
terms were soon disclosed, and the English Earl, already marked as the
successor of Edward, was made to swear, at Bayeux, as the price of his
liberty, to become the guardian of William’s supposed interests in
England, and to receive him, on Edward’s death, as King. These oaths
he took, with others, upon a chest which William had secretly filled
with the choicest saintly relics that Normandy contained. It does not
become us, with our later knowledge of the very unsaintly character
of the old bones usually palmed off in those times as the relics of
saints, to scoff at Harold turning pale when the tremendous character
of the contents of that chest was revealed to him. The credulity of
that age did not permit him the assumption that the alleged relics were
probably no more than the mere ordinary unsanctified plebeian bones and
teeth and fragments of skin we may readily presume them to have been,
with the same relation to the genuine articles as that of a Bank of
Engraving note to one issued by the Bank of England. Harold accepted
them, as he could not choose but do, at their face value, so to speak,
and trembled.
Such is the story handed down to us. The oath taken, Harold was free
to return; and, as his own conscience later told him, and as ours must
needs tell us, was free to disregard an oath, however solemn, taken
under circumstances of compulsion.
In two years from that time, January 5th, 1066, the Confessor died,
with his latest breath naming Harold his successor—a choice later
ratified by the council of the English realm. Harold was elected and
proclaimed King, and the warrior-lawyer over in Normandy was left out
in the cold. William, however, could not have been surprised at this,
and set to work upon the next step in his scheme, which was to obtain
the support of the Pope against “the perjurer,” as he was pleased to
style Harold. All these things had been thought out long in advance by
that wily brain. William, as claimant to the English throne, could be
effectively aided by William as champion of the Church’s might; and
William had ever been concerned, from motives of policy, to figure as
one of the Church’s most devout sons. If you consider it, religion
has ever, from the earliest times, been made the stalking-horse of
scoundrels: a fact so patent that your playwright or your novelist
is commonly concerned to furnish forth his villain with a text or a
psalm, and thus moral sentiments on the stage are the stigmata of the
wrong-doer.
XXXIX
The Pope, Alexander the Second, placing his ghostly terrors at the
disposal of William, declared Harold an usurper, and William the lawful
heir. Thus early had Englishmen to remember Rome for a disservice. It
then remained only for William to collect his forces for an invasion
of England. He set about the work with business-like promptitude and a
settled determination which, by comparison, make the great Napoleon’s
projected invasion of over seven hundred years later seem like the
wayward fancy of an infant. The forests of Normandy were felled
and converted into timber, and all the summer of 1066 thousands of
shipwrights were busily employed in Norman havens building the vast
fleet designed to invade our shores. When we form a mind’s-eye picture
of a fleet, we necessarily visualise nowadays something very different
from the flotilla prepared by the Duke of Normandy for the invasion
of England; but we must go far back, beyond even the small ships with
which Edward the First waged war in foreign parts, if we would see what
William’s navy, made of the green timber that had been growing six
months before, was like. His “ships” numbered, according to the lowest
computation, six hundred and ninety-six: according to the highest,
there were over three thousand; but if we turn to the indisputable
evidence of the famous Bayeux Tapestry it will be seen that they were
craft more in the nature of galleys—open boats with one mast.
The same want of exact figures meets the inquirer who seeks to learn
the number of that invading army. Contemporary chroniclers are at great
variance, the numbers, by their accounts, ranging from 14,000 up to
60,000. From February onwards to September those craft were building
and that army collecting. Meanwhile King Harold was not idle. He had
long been skilled in warfare, and was as able a general as William
himself, and by sea and land he was gathering a force together that in
all human probability would have annihilated the Norman host had it not
been for the happening that at this juncture divided his attention.
That happening was the invasion of northern England by the Norwegian
king, Harald Hardrada, in conjunction with Harold’s own brother, the
banished rebel Tostig, in September, at the very time when the Duke
of Normandy’s expedition was lying ready to sail, only waiting upon a
southern wind. The Norwegian host landed in the Ouse and the Humber,
and the English had been defeated at Fulford and Hardrada received in
York as a conqueror before the English Harold could march from London
to the scene. But when he arrived victory attended him, and in the
Battle of Stamford Bridge, September 25th, he not only defeated the
invaders, and killed Hardrada and his brother, Tostig, but almost
annihilated the foreigners. It was the supreme victory of a great
military career, and the last ever gained by the Saxon English. In the
midst of the rejoicings and the absolutely necessary rest at York,
Harold received the tidings of the Norman landing at Pevensey, near
Hastings.
Fate had indeed dealt hardly with that brave heart. He had marched full
two hundred miles to meet one foe, and he was now to march back to face
another, already established on the coast he had been so concerned
to guard. For the south wind that had been denied William for near a
month of waiting at the Dive and at St. Valery had, in this hour of his
need, played Harold false and had wafted the Norman sails across the
Channel. William landed unopposed on the deserted coast at Pevensey,
twelve miles to the west of Hastings, in the early morning of September
28th, and the next day marched to Hastings, which he made the base
of his operations. From that place he ravaged and laid waste all the
surrounding country, with the intention of drawing Harold down to the
sea-coast, to attack him in defence of his plundered and ill-treated
subjects. He reasoned, as an invader even in these times must needs
reason, that the chances were more in his favour if he could meet the
English by the shore. Were he obliged to march inland to the attack,
grave considerations of provisioning his army must be contended with,
and in the event of defeat his difficulties would have increased with
every mile he had advanced into the interior. He thus lay at Hastings,
within reach of his ships, while Harold was marching southwards, and
organising his army in London. There were not wanting those who at
this time warned William earnestly against what they considered the
folly of his enterprise. The might of the Saxons was no mere tale, and
messengers, coming southward with news of how Harold had defeated the
Norwegian invaders, and was now marching to repeat his victory upon the
Norman host, might well have made even so tried and fearless a soldier
as William retrace his steps. But he had come to victory or to death,
and had staked all upon this one throw for that magnificent prize, the
crown of England. Had he recrossed the Channel, it is certain that
never again would the opportunity of landing on an unguarded coast be
afforded him; and on all counts, now or never was his time. He had
taken a high moral ground for his invasion, and was come, by his own
claim, not as Conqueror, but as one claiming his legal rights, secured
on the most sacred of oaths and hallowed by the blessing of the Church.
Legal rights are the great standby of the plunderer and the spoiler,
and the stirrup for William’s vaulting ambition was legality. It was,
as we have seen, the kind of legality we associate rather with the
pettifogging attorney than with justice; but he had wrung the blessing
of Rome on it, and beside his banner floated the standard consecrated
by the Pope.
XL
William “the Conqueror,” as history styles him, never so styled
himself. His astute mind thrust such a warlike thing into the
background. He had only come to claim his own, and was unfortunately
obliged to fight for it against the perjurer! One can almost in
imagination hear the pietistic snuffle of a Pecksniff in this mixture
of legal and religious motives.
[Illustration: WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.
_Bayeux Tapestry._]
It was about October 5th that Harold reached London. He lay there six
days, awaiting the promised reinforcements from his northern Earls,
which never came, and in the meanwhile calling in his levies from the
near counties. But before he set out for Sussex he paid a last visit
to his abbey of Waltham, which he had dedicated to the Holy Cross
and had enriched with many gifts—evidences of his piety. For we must
by no means believe that William, the self-constituted champion of
sacred relics and the Church, alone practised, or professed, religion.
Harold’s piety was at least as marked, and it is perhaps not altogether
the Englishman’s sympathy for an Englishman, or his chivalrous regret
for the vanquished, which sees in the ill-fated King’s abasement before
the Holy Rood of Waltham on the eve of that fatal struggle a more
sincere approach to the Most High. He lay prostrate upon the pavement
in supplication, and the dark, wonder-loving legends of that time tell
us that, as he did so, the hitherto raised head of the sacred image
bowed itself upon the Cross, as though enacting again the tragedy of
Calvary: in token, as the belief of that age ran, that the career of
Harold was finished.
The English army set forth from London on Thursday, October 12th,
and marched inevitably, it being the most direct route, by the line
of country through which runs the Hastings Road of our own day. So
speedily did the troops set out to meet their foe, that by Friday night
Harold had pitched his camp on this hill of Senlac, eight miles from
Hastings, on the site of this town of Battle.
A very ancient oak, known as the “Watch Oak,” stands in the private
garden of a house on the bye-road to the right entering Battle. It is
traditionally the spot whence Harold’s scouts watched for the approach
of the invaders.
No one is skilled to tell us whence came this name of Senlac, nor what
it meant. It was the “hill called Senlac.” Around it on three sides
were hollows, marshy with the feeders of little streams. The Normans
gave the name a French twist and called it “Sanglac” or “Sanguelac,”
the Lake of Blood; but although their perversion of the name is
ingenious, it will not serve our turn, since we see that the name of
Senlac existed prior to the battle. Nor will yet another Gallicised
version—that of Saintlache, or Holy Lake, do; and the meaning of the
old name belonging to this place of battle must of necessity be left in
obscurity.
Harold chose his own battle-ground, and chose it with the trained,
unerring eye of one who had been the victor in many hard-fought
campaigns. Electing to take up a defensive position in a spot where
the menace of his presence must needs make William fight, or remain
disastrously inactive on the coast, he ranged his army on the summit
of this long spur of hill that then thrust out boldly from the wooded
surroundings and commanded a view over gorse-covered folds of down,
away to the sea. He had every reason for this plan of awaiting attack,
chief among them the totally different characteristics of the two
armies: the Norman army being strong in cavalry, the Saxons fighting
wholly on foot, from King Harold and his two brothers, Gurth and
Leofwin, down to the merest churl; while on the Norman side there was
a strong force of archers, and on the Saxon none whatever. The Saxons,
or the English, as we perhaps should more properly name them, were
armed with javelins and with the two-handed battle-axe. The battle-axe,
carried over the shoulder and wielded from it with a two-handed grasp
and a swing of the whole body, was a terrible weapon in the hands of
a body of men acting purely on the defensive, but it was ill-adapted
for pursuit. A blow from it was easily capable of cleaving, not only
through the helmet and head of a horseman, but of felling both him and
his horse. Such was the weapon upon which the English chiefly relied in
standing their ground and to withstand the onset of the Norman horse,
which, owing to Harold’s strategy in seizing this commanding eminence,
would be under the necessity of charging uphill.
To render the position additionally secure, opportunity was taken, ere
night fell, to fortify the edge of the plateau with a palisade cut from
the surrounding woodlands, and to wattle it with twigs and boughs so
closely interwoven that it was impossible for a single person to creep
through. Here, then, the English army lay athwart where now runs the
road to the sea, but where at that time, beside a landmark named in
the old English Chronicle “the hoar apple-tree,” there was apparently
no other salient object save the rough track which must even then have
existed, leading down to the port of Hastings.
The night before the battle seems to us, and must even have seemed to
the opposing armies, a tremendously fateful interlude. Political and
other considerations were such that all must have known the fate of
England to depend, not upon a long campaign and a series of marches and
fights, but solely upon the issue of the great contest now impending.
How, then, did they pass the eve of battle? The Normans are our chief,
and almost sole, authorities here, and were concerned, as inevitably
they would be, to picture the Norman army as a host of Christian
soldiers going forth to war with a dissolute, drink-sodden rabble.
According to this partisan view, the Battle of Senlac, or Hastings,
was lost by the English chiefly owing to the effects upon them of an
all-night orgie of wassailing. When morning came, and with it the great
struggle that was to decide the fate of England, the English host were
still muzzy with their potations of the night before, and had not the
clear vision and cool judgment that are as necessary on the battlefield
as elsewhere. What a fine theme for a Temperance Lecturer, hot on the
subject of “the cursed drink”! Such an one might fitly show by this
instance how indulgence in it destroys not only the individual but the
nation itself; but no one seems ever to have fastened upon this very
eloquent illustration.
The Saxons certainly were mighty topers, and it is by no means too much
to say that they were a nation of drunkards. Ancient chroniclers at
all points fully support this sweeping statement; amongst them William
of Malmesbury, who tells us that the Anglo-Saxon rule was bad, and the
monks and nobility corrupt. “Drinking in parties,” he says, “was an
universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights, as
well as days.”
Coming to a description of the night before the battle, he tells
us, in the original Latin in which he wrote: “Angli, ut accepimus,
totam noctem insomnem cantibus potibusque ducentes.” That is to say,
in plain English, they kept awake all night, singing, and drinking
innumerable drinks—which is a very fine, fearless way of preparing to
meet the foe, and one highly expressive of contempt for him; but it is
not a wise way.
He then proceeds to expand his argument by saying: “The vices attendant
on drunkenness which enervate the human mind followed; hence it arose
that, engaging William more with rashness and precipitate fury than
military skill, they doomed themselves and their country to slavery by
one, and that an easy, victory.”
XLI
The Normans spent the night after a very different fashion—in prayer
and in the confession of their sins—for they knew that many must fall
on that eventful day. The Bishops of Coutances and Bayeux received
their confessions, and recorded their vows on this Friday night that
if they were spared on the morrow they would fast on Saturdays for the
remainder of their lives. William, for his part, registered a solemn
vow that if he gained the victory he would found a great church on the
battlefield, in gratitude for the divine aid. The Normans, in short,
made all due preparation; and as they prayed well, so did they fight,
on that fatal morrow.
Another, and a highly picturesque, chronicler tells us delightfully
of the alleged actual Saxon debauch on the battlefield, on the night
before the fray. This account is by Wace, the author of several
romances and narrative-poems in Norman-French. Wace wrote his jingling
metrical narrative about 1170, more than a hundred years after the
battle was fought, but probably incorporated the floating traditions of
that great occasion, doubtless still plentiful in his time.
Here is his picture of the Saxon orgies:
Quant la bataille dut joster,
La nuit avant, ço oï conter,
Furent Engleiz forment haitiez,
Mult riant è mult enveisiez;
Tote nuit mangierent è burent
Unkes la nuit et lit ne jurent.
Mult les véissiez demener,
Treper, è saillir è chanter.
The Norman-French in which Wace writes is somewhat puzzling, but the
general sense of it is that “the night before the battle was fought,
as I am told, the English were joyous, laughing much and skylarking.
They ate and drank all night, refusing to take any repose, and skipped
about, dancing and singing.”
Then he gives us the English shouts, as heard by the Normans:
_Bublie_ crient è _weissel_,
E _laticome_ è drincheheil,
_Drinc Hindrewart_ è _Drintome_,
_Drinc Helf_ è _drinc Tome_.
or, as we may put it, “Bubble it up!” they cried, and “Wassail!” and
“Let it come,” and “Drink hail!” “Drink hinderwards and drink to me,
drink health and drink to me!” Modernised, and applied to beer, which
is to our times what mead or metheglin was to the Saxons, “Bubble it
up!” would appear to mean “Froth it up,” or “Put a good head on it”;
while “Let it come” and “Drink hail!” are simply “Pass the bottle” and
“Here’s your health!” But how you drink “hinderwards,” unless it means
“Pass the bottle back again,” I cannot conceive.
At any rate, it is quite evident, by this account, that these English
warriors had each a thoroughly good skinful of booze overnight. They
seem to have almost wallowed in it, and were precisely the men who
would have appreciated the bibulous spirit of that drinking ballad of
modern times, which ran something after this style:
Beer, beer, glorious beer;
Fill yourself right up to ’ere.
Up with the sale of it,
Down with a pail of it,
Glorious, glorious beer.
Up with the trade of it,
Drink till you’re made of it,
and so forth, in a style eminently calculated to win the hearts of my
lords Ardilaun, Iveagh, Hindlip, and Burton.
But the Saxon mead, which may still be discovered in remote parts of
the country as the home-brewed “metheglin,” a sweet and sickly liquor
made from honey, is a heady drink, a great deal more likely to result
in a splitting headache the next morning than the clearer brew of the
barley; and the Norman libellers would have us believe that, because of
that matutinal headache, and an enlarged vision which led the English
to see two, or three, Normans for every one—and to strike at the ones
that were not there—they lost the Battle of Hastings.
The historical facts do not quite fit in with that view. Doubtless
the English and the Norman methods of passing the battle-eve were
different. For one thing, the Norman wolf was posing, until he almost
deceived himself, as the injured party, and one fighting the battle
of religion as well as of personal wrongs; and he acted fully up to
those parts. The English, on the other hand, were elated with their
recent victory in the north, and felt a not unnatural confidence in
their ability to repeat it. Therefore, they went into battle with
less solemnity than the Normans. But we nowhere read that the English
battle-axes were swung with the less terrible effect because of the
revels which may or may not have passed overnight in the English camp,
and nothing seems more certain than that victory only fell to the
Normans because of the mistaken warlike ardour of a portion of the
English army, which broke its ranks in order to pursue a panic-stricken
section of the Norman array, and thus afforded William’s cavalry a
footing on that bitterly contested hill of Senlac.
XLII
The battle began about nine o’clock in the morning, the Norman army
marching from Hastings by the spot where Crowhurst Park is now seen,
to Telham Hill, the “Hetheland” of the chroniclers. Here the Norman
knights put on their armour, and here William made his vow that if
victory were given him he would build a great abbey on the spot where
he saw the emblazoned English banner of the Fighting Man flung proudly
upon the morning breeze. His army then advanced to the attack, the
archers on foot in the front rank, the swordsmen behind them, and in
the rear the cavalry. William himself was armed with an iron mace, the
weapon also carried by his brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.
The fight began with a discharge of arrows from the Norman ranks,
followed by the singular interlude provided by Taillefer, the Norman
jongleur, or minstrel, who rode forth from the ranks singing songs of
chivalry, and of the knightly doings of Roland and Charlemagne. He had
begged from William the privilege of striking the first blow, but as
he went out into the space between the confronting armies he assumed
first his character of a juggler, throwing his sword into the air, and
then catching it, to the astonishment of the English, who doubtless
wondered what manner of warrior was this. But, ceasing his tricks, he
suddenly rushed upon the English ranks, and piercing one Englishman
with his lance and striking down another with his sword, was thereupon
himself slain. It was the bravest, or, if you will, the most foolhardy,
act of the battle, for he went forth to certain death. But his action
did this much: it heated the blood of both sides, and those who might
have fought at the beginning without the full fury of enthusiasm, now
fell to it in frenzy, fired by his example. It heartened William’s
second line, the infantry, to their heavy task of advancing, under the
showers of English stones and javelins, up the hill to the attempted
destruction of the palisade; but although they strove, the effort was
too great. All who approached within the reach of English arms and
English axes were struck down, almost cleaved asunder, and although
the rear ranks filled the air with _Dieu aide!_ they wavered from that
first onset, the English shouting “Out, out!” as they thrust back every
one from their defences, varying that cry with the pious invocations,
“Holy Rood,” “Holy Cross,” and “God Almighty!”
Wace tells us of those battle-cries in his quaint renderings of the
English the Normans heard:
_Olicrosse_ sovent crioent,
E _Godemite_ reclamoent;
_Olicrosse_ est en engliez
Ke _Sainte Croix_ est en franceiz,
Et _Godemite_ altretant
Com en franceiz _Dex tot poissant_.
Or, translated:
Holy Cross they often cried,
And shouted God Almighty;
Holy Cross is in English
What _Sainte Croix_ is in French,
And God Almighty is, otherwise,
As they say in French, _Dieu tout puissant_.
If the English really did say “’Oly Cross,” it shows us that the letter
“h” was as slighted in the eleventh century as it is in the twentieth.
The Norman infantry had now recoiled, and the turn of the cavalry
was come. The choicest chivalry of Normandy, however, strove in vain
uphill against the English defences, and many a horse and his mail-clad
rider fell beneath the axes. Harold’s choice of a battle-ground and
his defensive tactics were fully justified, and the Battle of Senlac
would have been his but for the fatal impetuosity of a portion of his
less disciplined troops, who, seeing the panic and headlong flight
of the Norman army, broke their ranks in pursuit. The temptation was
great, for everywhere the Normans were in flight, and the awful cry had
been raised among them that William himself was dead. It was only by
removing his helmet and disclosing his face that his men were assured
of his existence. “Madmen!” he cried. “Why flee ye? Death is behind,
victory before you. I live, and by God’s grace I will conquer,” and so
saying he forced those immediately around him back into the fray.
This incident has been carefully pictured in the Bayeux Tapestry, where
we see “the Duke comforting his young soldiers” by disclosing his face,
while his standard-bearer draws attention to him. The impressiveness
of the scene is perhaps a little marred by the grotesque drawing, and
by the extraordinary likeness of “the Duke” to Mr. Arthur Roberts, and
of one of the “young soldiers” to accepted caricatures of Mr. Austen
Chamberlain.
[Illustration: “DUKE WILLIAM COMFORTS HIS YOUNG SOLDIERS.”
_Central incident of the Battle of Hastings. From the Bayeux Tapestry._]
Meanwhile the flying Norman infantry had in other parts of the field
turned upon their pursuers, and here the sword proved the better
weapon, for the rash English were cut to pieces. Then, somewhere about
three o’clock in the afternoon, began the most terrible attack of that
dreadful day, in the desperate charge made by William, his brothers
Odo and Robert, and their attendant knights, against the sturdy group
around Harold and the English standard. William, on horseback, sought
out the English King, and might have met him face to face, had not
the King’s brother, Gurth, flung a spear at him, which, although it
missed the greater mark, brought down his horse. Unlucky, ill-aimed
blow! It brought Gurth and William face to face, afoot, and presently
the English Earl was lying dead from a blow of the Duke’s mace. Near
by, and almost at the same time, fell Harold’s other brother, Leofwin.
The English fortunes were indeed running low, but the battle was not
yet decided. Still that devoted phalanx of axemen hewed down most of
those who approached, and the day was neither lost nor won. It was then
that the ill-judged pursuit made by the English a little earlier bore
bitter fruit—the sorrow of it! William had noted its effect, and now
that his direct attacks were like to fail, he had recourse to the wily
trick of a feigned flight. Accordingly, to his instructions, a wing of
his army turned tail and fled, as though in panic; and immediately,
learning nothing from that earlier disaster, a portion of the English
came down after them. It was the turning-point of the day, for the
ground the English had left was just the one end of the hill where the
rise was appreciably less steep, and more easily to be charged up by
the Norman cavalry. The fight down in the valley between the pretended
fugitives and their pursuers meanwhile went forward with varying
fortunes. The flying Frenchmen turned, as before, but this time the
English seized on an outlying hill, and although they fell, they fell
in company with their foes. In their turn, they inveigled the French
horsemen into charging upon them into an unsuspected ravine, where they
fell in a mass and were despatched to the last man, so that the old
chroniclers tell us, and the Bayeux Tapestry shows, how the hollow was
filled with the dead.
[Illustration: LAST STAND OF THE ENGLISH.
_Bayeux Tapestry._]
William and the pick of his army now beset the hill from its western
slope, thus left open by the descent of the pursuing English, and here,
and along the ridge to the very spot where Harold stood, wielding his
axe with the best of them beneath his standard, the fight stubbornly
continued. The autumn day was now fast drawing to its close, and the
battle might have been still undecided that night, had it not been for
an inspiration that seized William. His archers had hitherto not made
any great impression. He now ordered them to shoot their arrows into
the air, so that they might descend with terrific force upon the heads
of the English; and this done, the execution was dreadful. Many were
struck in the eye by the falling shafts, among them Harold, the English
King himself. An arrow pierced his right eye, and as he agonisedly
strove to withdraw it, the shaft broke. Let us not enlarge upon this
dreadful end of the patriot King, who was presently discovered and
slain by the Norman knights as he lay upon the ground at the foot of
his royal banner.
[Illustration: FLIGHT OF THE ENGLISH CHURLS.
_Bayeux Tapestry._]
Thus fell Harold, in his prime, for he was but forty-four years of
age. It happened long, long ago; but although much else has turned
to dry-as-dust in that vast interval, and although many historical
figures and the deeds they wrought are mere vacuities, emptinesses, and
parchment-like bogles, the heroic death of Harold in defence of his
country still calls up bitter sorrow in those of us to whom history is
not merely the printed page, or a glass-covered case in a museum.
When Harold fell England fell with him. All who fought with him that
day knew it must be so, yet the fight, although it was by now a
hopeless cause, went on until the evening deepened into night; and
although those of meaner estate may have fled when the fortunes of the
day were obviously lost, those of higher sort plied their axes to the
death. Few of them escaped, or sought to do so. Yet, even as the last
streaks of waning day faded into night the defeated and fleeing English
turned once more upon their foes, and in the marshy hollow in the rear
of the battle-ground, then eloquently called “Malfosse,” slew in great
numbers the Norman horsemen who incautiously pursued them. It was the
last expiring effort of the day, but so sturdy an one that the Normans
were for awhile stricken again with a temporary panic, thinking that
English reinforcements had arrived. But no fresh troops were come to
save that situation; and not even at this last moment had the northern
Earls, Edwin and Morcar, sent aid to redeem their characters. They live
in history in company with Judas and many another perjured traitor. By
their treachery England was lost.
XLIII
The battle was over, after more than nine hours’ continued fighting;
and now William’s tent was pitched upon the spot where the English
standard had been planted. There he supped, and there, amid the
thousands of dead and dying, he slept. On the morrow the mutilated
body of Harold was found; but neither the bribes nor the entreaties
of his aged mother, Gytha, who had now lost all her sons in battle,
could induce William to yield it to her or any other. The perjurer, the
excommunicate, he swore, should not have religious sepulture. Harold’s
body should rest in unhallowed ground, beneath a cairn of stones on
the rocks of Hastings, and should thus in death guard the Saxon shore
he had guarded in life. And so to the shore at Hastings, wrapped in
a purple robe, his body was borne. And truly, no other burial could
be so fitting for the hero whose life was given for his trust. The
Duke of Normandy was no sentimentalist, and to the minds of that age
unconsecrated interment was a thing to be thought of only with a
shudder; but he was chivalrously poetic here, without a suspicion of it
himself, for no hero was ever laid in more fitting place than Harold,
by the salt selvedge of the coast he had sworn to protect, and did
protect to his last moment: and as for consecration—why, there be those
who dare to think that the laying there of this man’s body, who shed
his life-blood for the land that gave him birth, was itself hallowing
and consecration transcendent for that rocky marge.
But the epic fitness of Harold’s resting-place was not perceived by
that age, or was thought a thing of lesser moment than that he should
be accorded religious burial; and thus it happened that, when the fury
of the Conqueror’s first rage had died down, permission was accorded
for Harold’s body to be translated to Waltham Abbey, the great minster
himself had founded in Essex. The last days of the terrible year of
1066 were drawing in when that re-interment took place, and Sussex lost
the bones of her patriot.
This is pre-eminently the era of national memorials, when heroes of
to-day and of yesterday and other personages whom we are not all agreed
to call heroes are honoured in effigies of bronze. ’Tis but yester-year
since Alfred the Great was duly, and properly, commemorated in this
shape, in his city of Winchester, and a statue of William of Orange—our
William the Third—was erected, not so long since, on the spot where he
landed, at Brixham, in Tor Bay; but Harold yet awaits his turn. For the
why of it, I know not; unless indeed it be that we English are ever a
thought too practical, and honour, not so much endeavour, as success.
Alfred was successful; Harold in the end was crushed, and his England
broken. Yet it was not himself was lacking; it was his rash irregulars,
who, by their headlong zeal, lost him the day. He strove his utmost,
and that utmost was, beyond rivalry, noble.
To say, “He did his best,” is the noblest epitaph we can give any man,
and none should grudge Harold posthumous honour. We “Englishmen,” as
we may still call ourselves, are not yet so indisputably the masters
of the world that we can afford to disregard our national heroes,
and Harold’s statue, of appropriate heroic size, surely should stand
prominently over Hastings, to show newer generations how we can honour
even endeavour that has won to no position, and that we can remember
even our defeated heroes.
The Conqueror, as we must call him, despite his studied avoidance of
that title, inimical to his “legal” claim, fully redeemed his vow to
build a great abbey upon the field of battle. He built the Abbey,
which he dedicated to St. Martin of the Place of Battle, on the place
where so many had been slain to satisfy his ambition, rearing the High
Altar, the holiest spot, on the exact position where Harold had fallen.
William Faber, that _Fabricius_, or smith, turned monk, who was present
at the great battle, and had been at the Duke’s side when he vowed the
Abbey here, would, when it came to the actual building of it, have
chosen another site; for here, he urged, on the hill-top, water was
lacking. Let him and his brethren from the Abbey of Marmoutiers build
in the valley, where the springs were never dry. But this suggestion
outraged the Conqueror’s sense of the dramatic fitness of things,
which, as we have already seen in his selection of Harold’s seashore
resting-place, was a very keen sense indeed. No: he would build upon
the actual field of battle, or not at all; and if the Almighty spared
his life, wine should be more plentiful in that Abbey than water
elsewhere.
Battle Abbey very soon began to rise on that field of blood. The
King of England, as he was now become, spent money freely on it
from his treasury; ship-loads of the fine building-stone of Caen
came continually across Channel from Normandy, until, by one of
those miraculous dreams dreamt at need in those times, a bed of
stone was discovered, and a quarry opened, in the neighbourhood. The
rising Abbey was richly endowed with manors far and near, and was
made the centre of a three miles’ circuit exempted from all other
jurisdictions, ecclesiastical or civil. Its abbots, moreover, were
mitred and seated in the councils of the realm, and beside holding the
privilege of sanctuary, theirs were the rights of free warren, inquest,
and treasure-trove. Were they merciful men and pitiful, then those
dispositions could be humoured to the full, for they were given the
prerogative of pardoning any criminal they met on his way to execution:
a prerogative that meant much in those days, when execution was done
upon criminals for a large variety of offences.
More interesting than all others among William’s gifts to the Abbey
were his sword and his coronation robes, which, stripped of their gold
and silver chains and amulets in the reign of Rufus, for centuries
remained objects of the greatest curiosity. But the Abbey was long
a-building, and twenty-eight years had flown since the battle and
William himself had been seven years in his grave, before it was
completed and finally consecrated.
XLIV
And then it stood in this noble situation for well over four hundred
and fifty years, growing in architectural splendour and worldly wealth,
but decaying in religious life and morals, in common with all other
monasteries. Its income was equal to £10,000 per annum of our money:
the Abbot entertained guests of the noblest, and the brethren’s
indiscriminate charity made Battle a centre for all the “mighty
beggaris, sturdye vagrantes, idle mychers, and foule cozeners” in
Sussex. It was rotten-ripe and full fit to be plucked when Henry the
Eighth ended the monasteries and when his Commissioners appeared before
its doors on May 27th, 1538.
To sentimentalise over the suppression of places like Battle Abbey
would be excusable in the ignorant; in those fully informed it would
be criminal. It cannot be too often repeated that the work undertaken
by Henry the Eighth was no mere capricious act of tyranny, was no
unwarrantable or unprovoked attack upon the religious houses. Wyclif
had long before, at the close of the fourteenth century, declared that
the rotting trunk of the monastic establishments cumbered the ground.
In 1414 over one hundred alien priories were suppressed. In 1489 Pope
Innocent the Eighth issued to the Archbishop of Canterbury a commission
for a general investigation. Parliament itself had petitioned Henry
the Fourth for seizure of the possessions they administered so ill.
Wolsey had from within the Church seen the decadence of the Abbeys and
Priories, and himself suppressed a number of the smaller houses and
devoted their property to the better use of education.
It is a cloud of witness to the general and cumulative disgust of the
times with the enclosed life.
The Commissioners came to Battle, dressed fantastically in the plunder
of other religious houses they had ransacked on their way, “decked in
the spoils of the desecrated chapels, with copes for doublets, tunics
for saddle-cloths, and the silver relic-cases hammered into sheaths
for their daggers.” They, in short, committed on their side almost as
many excesses as the foul-living, blasphemous monastic brethren had on
theirs; but they had this excuse: that if they indeed made a mockery of
religion, it was the monks themselves first showed them the way of it.
The report of Dr. Layton, Chief Commissioner, described the conduct of
Battle as “the worst that ever I see in all other places, whereat I see
specially the blake sort of dyvellyshe monks.” Their doings, however,
had not been so bad as those of establishments subsequently visited,
whose sins will scarce bear mention.
But the monks of Battle had always been prepared to go considerable
lengths for money. In the monastery was hung the famous “Roll of
Battle Abbey,” purporting to be the roll-call of the Norman knights
on the morning of the Battle of Hastings, to which they answered
“Here,” or “Ici,” or “Adsum,” as might be. This historical parchment
is reported to have been removed to Cowdray, where it perished in the
fire of 1793, but it had, centuries before, been so tampered with by
the monks that all its value had been destroyed. It early became a
foible among noble or wealthy families to declare that their ancestors
“came over with the Conqueror,” and Battle Abbey was always ready to
oblige a liberal patron by adding his name to the Roll. In the words
of Dugdale: “Such hath been the subtility of some Monks of old, that,
finding it acceptable unto most to be reputed descendants to those
who were companions with Duke William in that memorable Expedition
whereby he became Conqueror of this Realm, as that, to gratify them
(but not without their own advantage) they inserted their Names into
this antient Catalogue”; and Camden repeats the charge. “Whosoever,” he
says, “considers well shall find them always to be forged, and those
names inserted which were never mentioned in that authenticated record.”
On the surrender of Battle Abbey, it and its lands were granted by the
King to Sir Anthony Browne, in 1538. The knight did not come into his
property with the good will of the neighbourhood, which, pauperised by
and dependent on the monks, with anger saw them thrust forth into the
world, and loved to tell how the last of the brethren to issue from the
gate turned and cursed him with the doom of the sacrilegious. “By fire
and water,” he declared, his line should end. We are not told whether
Sir Anthony Browne quailed—as on the stage he certainly would have
done—or if he merely laughed; but there can be no doubt that the people
of Battle awaited the issue with great interest, and that, when nothing
happened, they were disappointed. Instead of Sir Anthony Browne or any
of his family being cut off untimely, they flourished exceedingly, and
his son became a peer, under the title of Viscount Montagu.
The estates of Battle passed from the family in the time of the sixth
Viscount, who in 1719 sold them to Sir Thomas Webster, the first of a
long line of Baronets who (with an interval from 1857 to 1901) have
held them ever since. In all that time the curse slept, and possibly
when the sixth Viscount Montagu parted with Battle and retired wholly
to his great mansion and beautiful park of Cowdray, he thought the
spell had been effectually broken by this severance.
But the long-dormant curse woke up and worked itself out in 1793,
when the beautiful mansion of Cowdray was destroyed by fire. In the
following month the eighth Lord Montagu, while yet ignorant of this
disaster, met his death by drowning in the Falls of Lauffen, near
Schaffhausen, when attempting to shoot the rapids in a boat. He was but
twenty-four years of age.
The next heir to the estates of Cowdray, the ninth and last Viscount,
was a Roman Catholic priest, who died childless, in 1797, in spite of
the fact that he was dispensed from his vows in order that he might
marry and continue the line. The property was then inherited by his
sister, Mrs. Stephen Poyntz, whose two sons were shortly afterwards
drowned at Bognor. Her husband then sold Cowdray.
All this proves how very careful it behoves those to be who launch
curses on roving commissions. Even the Websters seem to have shared
to some degree in this malediction, for the fourth Baronet committed
suicide, June 3rd, 1800, by shooting himself with a pistol at his
London house in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square. He had been
embarrassed by heavy losses at cards. This eccentric and unfortunate
man, Sir Godfrey Webster, married Elizabeth Vassall, a great Jamaican
heiress, who in 1795, at Florence, while her husband was away in
England on business, left him and her two children for the third Lord
Holland. Lord Stavordale, in his memoir, skates cautiously over the
thin ice of this affair. He says the meeting of that guilty pair “was
destined to alter the whole course of their lives. They became deeply
attached to one another, and after many months spent in various parts
of the Continent, returned to England in 1796.”
Sir Godfrey obtained a divorce in July, 1797, and two days later Lord
Holland married the lady, known to diarists and writers of memoirs
as “the celebrated Lady Holland.” Had she been less rich she would
doubtless have been merely “the notorious.” Her entertainments and her
biting wit (she was a kind of female Douglas Jerrold) absolved her
from the ostracism that would have been the lot of one less wealthy,
less acid, and less hospitable. She lived a long life in the centre of
political and social functions, and died in 1845.
This Sir Godfrey Webster is “the very worthy Baronet” referred to
by “Thomas Ingoldsby” in the preface to the second edition of the
“Ingoldsby Legends” as “protesting against a defamatory placard at a
general election”:
Who steals my purse steals stuff!—
’Twas mine—’tisn’t his—nor nobody else’s!
But he who runs away with my GOOD NAME,
Robs me of what does not do him any good,
And makes me deuced poor:
a novel reading of Iago’s passionate declaration, _Othello_, Act iii.,
Scene 3:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he, that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that, which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
His also was the reading:
Pray, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty cock-horses?—
a new version of Bolingbroke’s speech in _Richard the Second_:
Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
[Illustration: A DESCENDANT OF THE SAXON CHURLS.]
Sir Godfrey Webster, sixth Baronet, in 1857 sold Battle Abbey to Lord
Harry Vane, afterwards Duke of Cleveland, chiefly because of the
extraordinary situation brought about by there being at that time
no fewer than five dowager Lady Websters drawing jointures from the
already impoverished property. It had long been a cherished dream of
the Websters to repurchase their old home, and this was realised
in 1901 by Sir Augustus Webster, the present and eighth Baronet, on
the death of the Duchess of Cleveland. But although he effected that
aim, he could not maintain the Abbey itself, and accordingly let it
to Mr. Grace, the wealthy American who resides there now and lords it
over this historic spot and this beautiful park occupied by English
gentlemen when the place whence he came was the primeval forest roamed
by the North American redskin. It is a picturesque example of the newer
conquering of England by the dollar, over eight hundred years after
the famous battle that won it with the sword.
It is in a remote and picturesque corner of the park, in Powder
Mill House, that Sir Augustus Webster resides; in a house which, as
indicated by its name, was one of those gunpowder factories whose
numerous accidents, according to Horsfield, historian of Sussex, “it
would be harrowing to relate and uncharitable to publish.”
The manufacture is a thing of the past at Battle, but the great pond,
used in the work, remains, and so do those brushwood thickets that
contributed charcoal to the industry. Brushwood coppices are still one
of the character-touches of the place, and those “leather-legged chaps,
the clay and coppice people,” as Cobbett names them, are, as they have
been from Saxon times, the greater proportion of the inhabitants. Any
day their rustic and toil-worn figures, bent under huge faggots, may be
seen in Battle street, and they serve to show how, although the Normans
and the monks in turn have gone, the rural Saxon people remain.
When Sir Anthony Browne came into possession of Battle, he lost no
time in demolishing the church of the Abbey and many of its domestic
surroundings. The Abbot’s great hall and apartments he converted into
a mansion, and with a portion of the stones from the demolished church
added other rooms.
[Illustration: BATTLE ABBEY.]
XLV
All these things are enclosed within the massive walls and the great
Gateway that face the open market-place of Battle town as though the
Abbey itself were still perfect behind them. Once a week great crowds
of visitors come from Hastings, by rail, by waggonette, or a-foot, and
pay their sixpences to be conducted over the place. They see the wooden
beam projecting from the walls of the Gatehouse, and learn that it
was a gallows; they are bidden look through the windows of the modern
drawing-room that was the monastic “locutorium,” or parlour, for the
reception of strangers; they stand on the terrace, and look down upon
the valley of Senlac and the corresponding heights of Telham, the way
the Conqueror’s army advanced to the attack. Then the guide conducts to
the site of the High Altar, the spot where Harold fell, to the gardens,
once the Cloisters; then to the great roofless Refectory. Beneath it
are the three fine crypts. One of them the guide calls the Scriptorium,
but the name has little meaning for him. If you ask him to point out
the site of the Œsophagus, the Pericardium, or the Cerebellum, he will
look puzzled for a moment; but, rallying, will declare them to have
been destroyed so long ago that their sites are uncertain. At last,
with evident relief, he conducts the crowd to the gate, and saying,
“That’s all I can show you to-day, ladies and gentlemen,” dismisses
them.
A relic of more savage times than these of ours still exists in the
market-place, in the iron ring to which the bull was tethered when
bull-baiting was a popular sport. It has recently been covered over
with earth.
[Illustration: BATTLE CHURCH.]
The parish church of Battle, standing beside the road on the way out
of the town, was a “peculiar,” _i.e._ independent of ecclesiastical
control. Its incumbent is not merely a vicar or a rector, but a dean,
and is appointed by the owner of Battle Abbey, still the lay Abbot. In
the chancel lie Sir Anthony Browne and his wife, with a magnificent
tomb over them, and in the churchyard is the humble stone to Isaac
Ingall, who died after ninety years’ service at the Abbey, in 1798,
aged 120. Beginning as postilion, he ended as major-domo. At the age
of 107, resentful of some indignity—perhaps some one had called him
“old”—he went off in quest of another situation.
[Illustration: A BYE-ROAD AT BATTLE.]
Beneath the town and the church, the road crosses the railway. The
allotment gardens, squalid with little sheds, after their kind, stand
below Harold’s centre, on the spot where the fight raged fiercest. But
the finest idea of the battlefield is to be obtained from the bye-road
that here turns to the right, and, skirting the park, runs to the site
of the old Powder Mills. It is far better than looking down, with the
crowd, from the terrace of the Abbey, and hearing the parrot-talk of
a guide. Here you are in the spirit-company of the invaders, and can
appreciate better their task of charging up to that ridge where Harold
and his warriors stood then, where the Abbey buildings stand now.
It is magnificent. The park-like landscape, dotted with clumps of trees
in the uplands; a line of oaks and undergrowth following the course
of the stream in the bottom; the town nested in woods, and Caldbeck
windmill on the right, where, the rustics say, William “called ’em
back.” Away down by Powder Mill House, in the coppices, one may still
see the rocky ravine in whose depths the Norman cavalry fell in the
fierce rally after their pretended flight. The ledges still drip red,
as they needs must do, for the ground is rich in iron; but, although
the explanation of the old legend that the soil weeps blood is prosaic
enough, yet the sight is not without its impressiveness, and vividly
recalls the magnificent opening lines of _Maud_:
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath;
The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”
XLVI
Over Telham Hill to Starr’s Green, past Crowhurst Park, where an
ancient tumulus peeps over the palings, lies the way to Hastings. On
the left-hand is the beautiful, but neglected, Beauport Park, fast
going back to wildness. Here a fork in the road is furnished with a
signpost directing both ways to Hastings. This puzzler for strangers
is explained by the right-hand and shorter route being the “New London
Road,” made when St. Leonards came into existence, and that to the left
the “Old London Road,” in exclusive use in days before St. Leonards was
thought of.
[Illustration: THE ROAD PAST CROWHURST PARK.]
The “new” road leads down to Hollington, a suburban village almost
entirely swallowed up by expansion of the town. One of the
old-established sights of Hastings is, or was, Old Roar, half a mile or
so to the left-hand of it.
Old Roar was a waterfall, and the ravine through which it roared exists
to this day, as those who seek it, after tracing several fields and
pathways hemmed in between villas, shall find. Even so far back as
1827 it was described as “not so considerable as thirty years ago,”
and sceptical writers of that time declared there never had been a
period when it was not said of Old Roar that “he is not so good as
last season.” In 1841 Mrs. Mozley, sister of Cardinal Newman, wrote
a novel called “The Lost Brooch,” which no one has ever succeeded in
reading, and in it she describes Old Roar as possessing “all the points
necessary for a very good cataract, except one—water: rather a serious
want in a waterfall.” Yet there was a time when its hoarse voice was to
be distinctly heard a mile away. Pause to-day on the wooden bridge that
spans the gorge, and only a dampness that discolours the stones is seen
through the trees that spring from the sides.
This is typical of much else around Hastings or any other town that has
equally expanded. To the right of the road lies Hollington church: the
“Church in the Wood,” famous in all this country-side as a romantic
solitude. There are woods here now, but not so extensive as before, and
the church is no longer in them, but on the fringe of what remains.
The church itself, restored and practically rebuilt, is utterly and
absolutely without interest; and the churchyard is now nothing but a
cemetery filled with costly and pretentious monuments. Yet, such is
the force of habit and tradition, it will be found, on examining the
huge, ledger-like visitors’ book kept in the porch, that an average of
five hundred people make pilgrimage to the spot daily in the holiday
season. They see nothing worth the trouble, and having seen it go away
again not displeased, for to visit the “Church in the Wood” is a duty
laid upon the holiday-maker, and will be, even when there is no wood
remaining. The way to and from it is by “Old Church Road,” where you
find houses named with even more than the usual want of propriety.
Thus “Sea View” does not look upon the sea, “Fair View” is opposite a
manure-heap, and from “Old Church View” you cannot view the church.
It is not worth the while exploring the New London Road. It is
dispiriting, and those electric tramways that are the tyrants of the
roads for miles around Hastings and St. Leonards render the way of
the cyclist down Silverhill hazardous in the extreme. It is true the
map shows the attractive name of “Bohemia” here, but it is only a
mean—the meanest and miserablest—suburb. Henri Murger, Bohemian of that
artistic and literary Bohemia that is not mapped, died, disillusioned,
exclaiming against his wasted life in that land of rosy visions, “_pas
de Bohème_,” and we may adopt his saying and, appropriating it to this
drab purlieu, turn back and make for Hastings by the Old London Road,
itself not particularly attractive in these times.
[Illustration: JUNCTION OF ROADS SPOILED BY TRAMWAYS, BALDSLOW.]
You come along it, at the beginning of Baldslow, to a weird corner
where a road comes up from Sedlescomb and, cutting under the Old London
Road in an archway, makes for St. Leonards. Here the tramway poles
and wires are insistently ugly, and the village or hamlet of Baldslow
itself is scarce prepossessing. A roadside public-house, a gaunt
windmill, a few ugly cottages, and a tin tabernacle church are its
component parts. But immediately beyond that corrugated and galvanised
ecclesiastical horror the road grows beautiful, overhung with trees.
Here, at the entrance to a country house in the domestic-gothic sort,
are two very fine clipped yew-trees. It is Holmhurst, and the trees
are those christened by Mr. Hare “Huz and Buz.”
Holmhurst is not historic, in the larger way, but to those who are
familiar with the literary work of Augustus J. C. Hare, it is a place
to be regarded with interest and affection. Augustus Hare wrote many
books. His “Walks in Rome” and “Walks in London” are the best known of
them, but his “Story of my Life” is of course the most intimate, and
it is the most endearing. His own half-humorous declaration that it
is “a ponderous autobiography of a nobody” was heartily and unkindly
endorsed by reviewers, but, at any rate, no one can read those six
volumes without conceiving an affection for the author of them. He was
a lovable man.
Augustus Hare, born 1834, died January 22nd, 1903, never married. He
came of the family of Hares of Hurstmonceaux, a family at one time so
numerous and so abundantly intermarried with the titled and landed
classes that he could claim cousinship in different degrees with a very
large circle in Society. But to call him a Society man would be as
unjust as it would be to style him a _dilettante_ in literature and the
arts, for he had no vices, was no idler, and earned a very excellent
literary repute. The “Story of my Life,” made up, as it is, largely
from letters and journals, recounting his visits and the people he met,
earned him with some sour critics of his work, the opprobrious title
of “literary valet,” but it is so sincere and without artifice that
the reproach is most undeserved, although his artistic, friendly, and
family sympathies certainly often led him into praises which amusingly
remind one of the famous epitaph on that Lady Jones who was “bland,
passionate, and deeply religious. She was a niece of Horace Walpole and
painted in water-colours, and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
A welcome guest at country-house parties, he generally figured at
them as a family connection, as a literary man and artist, and as an
accomplished narrator of ghost stories. He indeed “called cousins” with
so many people of note that the Crown Prince of Sweden, to whom he
became bear-leader for a time, when asked what astonished him most in
England, replied “the number of Mr. Hare’s cousins.” He was, in fact,
the human exemplar of the fabled “hare with many friends.”
XLVII
The story of his life is a strange one. He tells how, as the third
son, and most unwelcome addition to his parents’ growing family, he
was, at the age of eighteen months, given away by his father and
mother to a recently widowed and childless aunt, as eager to adopt,
as his unnatural parents were keen to be rid of him. The aunt was
Maria (Leycester) Hare, widow of his uncle Augustus; and thus, in
the similarity of Christian names at least, there was a peculiar
appropriateness in this adoption, which was undertaken in what seems
a very cold-blooded way: the parents to have no claim upon their son
and the aunt to be called “mother”; as indeed, throughout the story of
his life, she is styled. She brought him up and sent him to Oxford, and
for thirty years they lived together, as mother and son. He wrote a
panegyric on her, in the “Memorials of a Quiet Life,” and in the long
story of his own is seen to have been very much more affectionate than
many real sons are. Yet the reader of his pages cannot help coming
to the conclusion that the “sweet mother,” as he constantly styles
her, was not only afflicted with a very dour religiosity, but was a
tyrant in his infancy, and an exacting invalid, and an incredibly
mean, parsimonious and suspicious creature during his youth and early
manhood. But, for all that, no real mother ever had so good a son, so
tender and constant a nurse in sickness, as he.
[Illustration: “HUZ AND BUZ”: ENTRANCE TO HOLMHURST.]
When, in 1860, it became necessary for his adopted mother to leave Lime
and seek a new home, they long sought the ideal home of their fancy,
which they named, in advance, “Holmhurst.” All through that summer
they inspected innumerable small estates in the south of England, but
none were in the least like that ideal “Holmhurst,” and they were on
the point of abandoning the quest for awhile, and going abroad, when a
neighbour sent a Hastings paper with the humble advertisement, “At Ore,
a house with thirty-six acres of land, to be let or sold.”
“What a horrible place this must be,” I said, “for they cannot find
one word of description”; for the very ugliest places we had seen had
often been described in the advertisements as “picturesque manorial
residences,” “beautiful villas with hanging woods,” &c. But my mother
rightly thought that the very simple description was perhaps in itself
a reason why we should see it.... Long before we could arrive at Ore,
we passed under a grey wall overhung by trees. “It looks almost as if
there might be a Holmhurst inside that wall,” I said. Then we reached
a gate between two clipped yew-trees, and a board announced, “This
house is to be let or sold.” We drove in. It was a lovely day. An
arched gateway was open towards the garden, showing a terrace, vases
of scarlet geraniums, and a background of blue sea. My mother and I
clasped each other’s hands and simultaneously exclaimed—“This is
Holmhurst!”
We found that the name of the place was Little Ridge. There were six
places called Ridge in the neighbourhood, and it was very desirable
to change the name, to prevent confusion at the post-office and
elsewhere. Could we call it anything but Holmhurst? Afterwards we
discovered that Holmhurst meant an ilex wood, and our great tree is an
ilex.
And here they made their home. Ten years later his adopted mother died
here, and here he passed out of these shadows and unrealities, suddenly
and painlessly, when another thirty-two years had gone, little more
than two years after he had, in writing the concluding words of the
story of his life, said:
When I look at the dates of births and deaths in our family in the
Family Bible, I see that I have already exceeded the age which has
usually been allotted to the Hares. Can it be that, while I still feel
so young, the evening of life is closing in? Perhaps it may not be so;
perhaps long years may still be before me. I hope so; but the lesson
should be the same, for “man can do no better than live in eternity’s
sunrise.”
It would be unpardonable to leave unmentioned the additions to the
house he loved so well and the gardens and shrubberies he delighted
in. Still stands the sundial on the lawn, that sundial which had been
placed by his great-great-grandfather, Bishop Hare, on his house of
the Vatche, at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, and was presented
to him in 1859 by the then owners of the Vatche. Still one looks
delightfully across these uplands down to the sea, where the craggy
ruins of Hastings Castle cut across the horizon, and the streets of
Hastings come crawling dimly up out of the vale; but the Hospice in the
grounds, where he continually housed and entertained his pensioners,
is empty, and the garden-paths have lost their trimness and become
overgrown with grass since strangers have come and reduced the staff.
Even Queen Anne, whom he brought down from London and set up in the
meadow, looks neglected.
Every Londoner is familiar with the white marble group of figures in
front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, representing Queen Anne (now, alas!
deceased) presiding over four seated effigies, emblematic of England,
France, Ireland, and the North American Colonies of her days; but few
recollect that this group is not the original of the one sculptured by
Bird in 1712. Bird’s work had for many years fallen into a disgraceful
state of neglect. Her Majesty’s nose had long been chipped off and her
forearms had disappeared, while the four seated figures, with scarce a
complete set of limbs among them, more nearly resembled the victims of
a railway accident than the highly respectable allegorical group they
really were. The whole composition was therefore cleared away, and an
entirely new and scrupulously exact replica was made by the afterwards
notorious Richard Belt, and placed in its stead.
[Illustration: QUEEN ANNE, AT HOLMHURST.]
The battered and grimy original disappeared from public ken, and was
wholly forgotten, when Mr. Hare in 1893 discovered its component parts
lying in a heap in the City of London stoneyard, on the point of being
broken up, and greatly coveted them for the embellishment of Holmhurst.
He found that the poor relics were jointly owned by the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the Lord Mayor, and eventually
persuaded all those eminent personages to make him a present of the
remains, which were removed by road to Holmhurst, “at great expense,”
as he says, with the aid of twenty-eight horses, four trucks, four
trollies, and sixteen men. He re-erected them in his grounds, at a
still greater expense, on a circular stone pedestal, similar to the
original, which he had quarried from the outcroppings of stone on this
little estate.
XLVIII
Beyond Holmhurst comes the long-drawn parish of Ore, heralded by its
modern church, rather overloaded with ornament. It replaces the old
church of St. Helen, lying hidden away to the right, across a field and
within a belt of trees.
Augustus Hare thought the ruins of the old church “rather picturesque”:
an instance of how an everyday familiarity may blunt appreciation,
for they are picturesque without any minimising qualification. To the
active and enterprising it is no difficult matter to climb the tall
locked gate of the enclosure that keeps out the swarming mischievous
children that come destructively up out of Hastings, and easy to avoid
the plentiful nails and savage barbed wire that would induce others to
seek the keys at Ore Place.
It is a melancholy ruin of a fine church in the Perpendicular style,
built over five hundred years ago, and left to moulder away because
the neighbourhood lusted for the brand new building beside the road,
yonder. The roof is entirely gone, and part of the walls, covered in
places with ivy. Neglect is the note of the place. A curious relic
is fixed on the wall in the tower in the shape of a “pitch-pipe,” an
instrument used by parish clerks in the old days to give the key of
tunes to congregations. The unusual name of “Lavender” is seen on one
of the old tombstones.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE OLD CHURCH, ORE.]
Ore is a scattered parish: neither good town nor decent country. The
road passes the Hastings cemetery and the isolated suburb of St.
Helen’s Down, and comes to the enclosing wall and gates of Coghurst
Park, where an elaborately sculptured coat of arms, surmounted by the
crest of a hare and hound, looks down with contempt upon the poor
specimens of houses that have sprung up opposite.
And then you come to Ore itself, that used to be, not so very long
ago, a pleasant place—half village, half suburb. It is now a good deal
more like a slum, and the incursion of the electric tramways has
not improved it. The tram-lines are to be avoided by bearing to the
right, down the long and steeply descending Harold Road, which, like
too many of the modern developments of Hastings, is a road of mean and
paltry houses, built cheaply and faced with stucco that seems to have
been made of dirt, rather than of honest materials. There is a woeful
“respectability” about these roads that desolates the stranger. He sees
it clinging, ineffectual on insufficient means, to the bayed windows
and to the doors, painted and grained to resemble good woods, that will
insist upon warping. It resides in the long flights of steps up to
those doors, and is on outpost duty at the little brick entrance-piers,
too flimsy to hold up the not very great weight of the iron gates that
scream dismally on their hinges.
The Old London Road, however, continues down through Halton, and,
although it does not get rid of the tram-lines, comes, at the beginning
of Hastings, to a very pleasant hollow where the old elms still make an
avenue introductory to the town.
This is the most striking part of that valley between the east and west
hills in which the Old Town of Hastings lies. It was in the coaching
days a supremely beautiful entrance to the town, and travellers of that
time never tired of praising it. In front of them, in the V-like cleft,
sparkled the sea, with the trees surrounding the hoary red-capped roof
of All Saints’ in the foreground, and on either side steep grassy
slopes, as yet but thinly built upon. On the left-hand rose the Minnis
Rock (“Minnis” is Cantise for a rough, stony common), a stony outcrop
on the hillside that was the site of a hermitage until about 1436,
when the “new church of All Saints’ of Hastynges” was built, and gave
the death-blow to the hermits who had lived there upon the charity of
passers-by. The Rock is there to this day, and the rough chambers in
it, but they are choked with rubbish. The last occupants were very much
post-Reformation anchorites. They were an old couple who left the local
workhouse in 1783, and, in a secular way, subsisted upon alms which the
original hermits received for religion’s sake.
[Illustration: THE OLD LONDON ROAD.]
The modern terrace of High Wickham crowns the Minnis heights at this
day, and great masses of houses have encroached upon the natural beauty
of the scene; but still there is a very special charm in it.
It is the _old_ town you see there before you, for whose sake we have
come these last three miles by the Old London Road: the only Hastings
there was, until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The site selected for the town was sheltered, as the traveller viewing
it from this point may see. It lay in the deep and not very broad
ravine between the East and West Hills, and while the one protected it
from the winds of one quarter, the other served the like office in the
opposite direction. And through the centuries, the Castle crowning the
West Hill kept watch and ward over it against other foes. There you see
the few shattered walls of it, against the sky-line, and down in the
hollow St. Clement’s, the mother-church of Hastings.
XL
Rising from amid the trees immediately before you, at the entrance
to the town and the branching of High Street and All Saints’ Street,
is All Saints’ Church, the other of the two old churches of the Old
Town. It stands immediately at the foot of that great chalky down
which drops sheer to the sea and is known as East Cliff; and its
crowded churchyard, hemmed in with grimy houses, runs at a steep
angle up the hillside. I am not greatly impressed with the interior of
the church, but its tower is altogether admirable. It has that best
thing in towers, sturdiness, and with its deeply splayed buttresses,
strongly marked stringcourses, and general air of refined emphasis, is
the embodiment of strength and beauty. I feel especially grateful to
it, for it stands just where it should for pictorial composition, at
the head of the old street, and it and the old “White Hart” inn form
excellent foils to one another, as Church and Inn should do. They are
as antithetic, in the sentiment of the scene, as light and shade are in
the rendering of it.
Let those who are desirous of immortal fame see that an eccentric
epitaph marks the spot where they lie. There is no surer passport
to eternal recollection. Thus, apart from “Old Humphrey,” a local
celebrity who lies here, the hundreds of the dear departed might be
anonymous for all any one cares; excepting three only. Even the casual,
unobservant stranger entering the church can scarce help seeing the
epitaph on “John Archdeacon,” who died in 1820, aged nine; but if he
did _not_ see it, it is quite certain his attention would soon be drawn
that way, for it is a cherished local curiosity:
Here lies an only darling Boy
Who was his widow’d Mother’s joy;
Her grief and sad affliction prove
How tenderly she did him love.
In childish play he teas’d a mule
Which rag’d its angry owner’s soul,
And through whose angry blows and spleen
This child so soon a corpse was seen.
His Mother now is left to mourn
The loss of her beloved Son.
Though sighs and tears will prove in vain,
She hopes in Heaven to meet again.
The name of a modern public-house in the town, the “Kicking Donkey,”
near St. Clement’s Church, would appear to have derived from this,
although the pictorial sign represents the quite different scene of a
seaside holiday-maker trying to keep his seat on the back of a restive
jackass.
The second unusual epitaph is to a smuggler:
This Stone
Sacred to the memory of
Joseph Swain, Fisherman
was erected at the expence of
the members of the friendly
Society of Hastings
in commiseration of his cruel and
untimely death and as a record of
the public indignation at the needless
and sanguinary violence of
which he was the unoffending Victim
He was shot by Geo. England, one
of the Sailors employ’d in the Coast
-blockade service in open day on the
13th March 1821 and almost instantly
expir’d, in the twenty ninth Year of
his age leaving a Widow and five
small children to lament his loss.
The third immortal is Edward Alldridge, “who was Maliciously shot,
April 23rd, 1806. Aged 41 years.” It is curious that his son Edward
was, according to the same stone, “accidentally shot, May 13th, 1810.
Aged 15 years.”
[Illustration: ALL SAINTS’.]
There is little time in this age for brooding over historical
celebrities or notorieties, but if Hastings dwelt much upon the past,
it could find little pleasure in the recollection that it was the
birthplace of Titus Oates, whose baptism is registered in 1619, in the
books of All Saints’, of which his father was afterwards rector. Titus
was himself curate here.
Much, indeed, might be written of the clergy of All Saints’, but not a
large proportion of it to their credit. I do not know if we may fairly
include him who was hanged at Tyburn in 1586 for the crime of forging
his presentation to the living. He was not properly rector. As he had
to be hanged in any case, it seems a pity they did not suspend him from
the tower of All Saints’; it would have been much more picturesque. He
was practically wasted at Tyburn, where executions were an everyday
dish.
Then there was the Reverend Mr. Hinson, royalist, who, busily
denouncing the Roundheads in his sermon of Sunday, July 9th, 1643, was
told that the subjects of his abuse were in the town, and the stern
Colonel Morley even then on the way to make him prisoner. He left his
discourse at a loose end and bunked, hooked it, vamoosed, cut his
stick, fled, or merely went—just as you please. Only, perhaps, to say
he “went” hardly meets the case, for he departed with such celerity
that he had not time even to shift his surplice. The Roundheads
thereupon occupied the church, made it a dormitory, preached burlesque
sermons from the pulpit, and generally behaved like blasphemous
blackguards, finally making off with all the surplices they could find.
Mr. Hinson was arrested three days later and lodged in a filthy gaol,
with a tinker to match, who was not only dirty but rude, and, declaring
he was the elder of the two, and therefore privileged, took the one
bench in the place, leaving the curate the cold, cold floor. He had
three weeks’ imprisonment at Hastings, and how much beside would have
been awarded him in London, whither he was removed, we do not know,
for he escaped and joined his King at Oxford, and so is heard of no
more.
A tablet in the church to a former rector with the humorous name of
Webster Whistler, a connection of Sir Whistler Webster, of Battle
Abbey, reminds one of a curious incident. He died at the great age of
eighty-four in 1831. A distinguished pluralist, he held the rather
distant benefice of Newtimber, on the Brighton Road, in addition
to this in Hastings. A quarrel with the squire of Newtimber led to
the living of that tiny place being put up to auction in 1817. The
clergyman was interested enough to be in London when the sale took
place, and to his disgust heard the auctioneer describe Newtimber as
held by an infirm and hoary vicar with one foot in the grave, and that
consequently the reversion would soon fall in. The Reverend Whistler
was then but seventy, and as hale and hearty as a ploughman. He arose
in wrath, and so convinced the room of his being good for another
twenty years that the advowson found no purchaser.
The much-beneficed Whistler was no ill friend to the smugglers, who
then formed a considerable part of the population of Hastings, and
passively lent his church to them for a cellar. It was told of him
that, hearing movements one night in his garden, and preparing to fire
upon those he thought to be burglars, a voice reassured him with the
whisper, “Hush, your reverence, it’s the brandy!” It was the smugglers’
thank-offering. The only flaw in this story is the circumstance that
the clergyman would not have mistaken his smuggling friends for
midnight marauders, for he was used to find such gifts brought to
his door. Later, when this kind of friendly understanding became too
notorious, the kegs were deposited in the crowded churchyard, and
visitors at his table sometimes heard him tell his man to “go and see
if there’s any brandy in old Swain”: “old Swain” being one of the
numerous clan of that very common name at Hastings, and lying in a
table-like tomb which made an excellent and unsuspected cellar.
When this picturesque cleric happened to find his cellar low, he was
not averse from hinting at the fact in the texts of his sermons.
Discourses upon the “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” and on
the miracle of turning water into wine, with applications readily
understood by his congregation, rarely failed in their object; for we
must by no means suppose that a smuggler was necessarily a lawless and
an impious, or even an ungrateful man: and a fervent piety was no bar
to “free trading.”
The most striking thing in All Saints’ Church is a curious notice in
the belfry, with words and letters running together like those of an
ill-read proof:
This is a belfry that is free
for all those that can civil be
and if you please to chime or ring
it is a very pleasant thing
There is no musick playd or sung
like unto Bells when they rwell rung
then ring your bells well if you can
Silence is best for every man.
But if you ring in Spur or hat
sixpence you pay besure of that
and if a bell you overthrow
pray pay a groat before you go
People who are commonly civil are not, as a rule, enjoined to show
civility, and it is therefore fair to assume that there had been
disturbances, and sweet bells jangled, before this old notice was set
up.
LI
All Saints’ Street is the most picturesque in the old town. Its houses
are for the most part ancient, and rarely are two alike. Many are
gabled, some lean heavily forward or against their neighbours, others
have latticed casements and great heavy timber frames; few are those
that are not sketchable, and in between them goes the long narrow
street, deep down below the raised pavements, towards the sea. The most
picturesque of these ancient tenements, and perhaps also the oldest,
is certainly the most famous, for it was the home of the aged mother
of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel at the time when his squadron came
cruising off the Sussex coast. We are told how, coming off Hastings,
the Admiral, saying he had business ashore, was rowed to the Stade.
Walking up All Saints’ Street, to the house pictured here, a humble old
woman came forth, and he kissed her, called her “Mother,” and asked her
blessing.
If improving frenzy will permit, the old house, already well on into
its fifth century, is sound enough to last centuries more; and when
modern iron and steel have rusted, or become brittle, its stout oaken
timbering will be as sturdy as ever.
[Illustration: OLD HOUSE, ALL SAINTS’ STREET.]
Between All Saints’ Street and High Street formerly ran the Bourne
stream to the sea. Its course is now marked by Bourne Street, running,
narrow and steep, to the shore.
And there is the sea. Not something outside the picture, as it seems to
the road-farer who, tracing the road to Brighton, comes at last to the
Aquarium, and finds the beach and the sea, as it were, “side-shows,”
but an intimate part of the place—great waves slapping down vigorously
upon a narrow shore, and, when the stormy winds do blow, spouting in
great clouds of spray overhead, bringing with them tons of shingle or
taking away many cubic yards of Parade and sea-wall.
No one could ever entertain the remotest doubt of Hastings being,
in the most intimate sense, the seaside. The roadway of the front,
especially the front of the Old Town, is so narrow, and the
groyne-protected beach in general of such meagre proportions that,
to be housed on the front, is to enjoy every sea-salty benefit of an
ocean voyage, without its accompanying miseries of sickness. But the
situation is not without its own peculiar drawbacks. Just as some great
vessel, ploughing through heaving billows, will, in sailor language,
“ship it green,” so do the more exposed houses take full measure when
waves run high, cataracts flowing down basement steps and converting
coal-cellars into impromptu marine tanks.
The elements at Hastings are at odds with the Board of Trade, which
has forbidden the Corporation to take beach from the foreshore. Winds,
waves, and currents deposit shingle in the roadway, and it has then to
be cleared up; and, since the Government Department cannot require it
to be replaced, it is sold. According to the town accounts for 1904,
the Town Council in that year made £24 out of 120 tons of beach washed
up in this way.
The sea in this Old Town corner of Hastings is undoubtedly the
“ever fresh, the ever free” of the poet: the rolling ocean, the
heaving billow, and everything adjectival in the marine sort. It is
unquestionably that which you fail in many places of the Eastbourne
type quite to realise: the home of little sprats and great whales;
the cruising-ground of fisher-boats, steamships, and navies, no less
than of the _Albertine_, the _New Albertine_, and the _Favourite_
sailing-yachts, on which you get very seasick for the ridiculous sum of
a shilling an hour.
The sea is that which your point of view makes it: home of the guardian
fleets; a course upon which steamships earn dividends for their owners;
the grave of thousands of drowned sailors; or fishing-ground for
trawlers and seiners.
For what were you created? Answer, wild waves! For the delight of the
midsummer child, with spade and bucket, and clothes tucked up; to
enable the railway companies to run excursions to the “resorts” risen
by the edge of you? What, on balance, are you: blessing or curse? You
render our shores inviolate, but your sundering straits and oceans
perpetuate Babel and maintain conflicting nationalities.
Were it not for you and St. George’s Channel there would be no Ireland,
and consequently no Home Rule Question. For that, at any rate, we owe
you a grudge—and must, since we cannot yet shift to fill that Channel
up—continue to owe it.
[Illustration: HASTINGS OLD TOWN.]
This is the Stade, where the fisher-town exists, sufficient to itself,
self-contained, and quite as apart in feeling, manners and customs,
from the modern town and St. Leonards as though it were sundered by
gulfs and distances, instead of just adjoining. Not a gulf, in fact,
but something in the way of a mountain—the West Hill—intervenes, and
only by the narrow line of George Street, Pelham Place, and Castle
Street is ready communication open. It is sufficiently ready, but
new town and old have different ideals in life, and agree to mingle
over that thoroughfare threshold only when business calls. In the
unconventional streets of the Old Town you lounge in the sunshine
at open windows, or squat in unconcerned deshabille on doorsteps,
gossiping across the width of the road; in modern Hastings the streets
are of a greater width, but the manners are more strait, and you do not
gaze forth from windows or exchange scandal with the house opposite.
The grandest view of Hastings is that of the Old Town from hard by
the modern, but picturesque, Lifeboat House, whence you see the great
East Hill looming magnificently up above the huddled houses that,
whether they be of old red brick or tarred wood, are all, in the mass,
artistically “right.” It is, in the summer, a crowded quarter, for the
excursionists who feel a little abashed by the stucco magnificences and
primnesses of newer Hastings and St. Leonards, and cannot elsewhere
come into close communion with the untamed sea, find here an ideal
dumping-ground for babies and provision-baskets. Here, thanks to modern
masonry groynes, a fine mass of beach is gradually accumulating, in
heaped-up plenty.
But it is not a crowded beach and a sunny sky that give the artist
his chance at this point. His opportunity comes at those times when
most folk would choose to be under shelter; when the rainbow arches in
the leaden sky, the domestic washing of the Old Town flaps wetly in
the squalls, and the distant tackle-boxes and the bell-turret of the
Fishermen’s Church stand out almost in the blackness of silhouettes.
Then the East Hill looks all its size, and more.
Unhappily, brutal things have been done in modern times to East Hill
and West, in the cutting of shafts through the chalk for lifts; and
the scar thus made in the face of the East Hill is, from many points,
atrociously prominent; while day-trippers have even been known to
mistake the embattled lift-station on the sky-line up there for the
Castle.
LII
But sketchable at every turn is the Stade: the very reverse of St.
Leonards, whose formal houses and formal people no one would choose to
sketch or interest one’s self in. Here is the “Dolphin” inn, the “House
for sea-wonders,” with an amazing fish from some distant clime hanging,
very goggle-eyed and finny, and very dry, by the door; and, no doubt,
stranger sights within. Beside it are “Tamarisk Steps.” Who is there
would not, for sheer love of their names, explore Tamarisk Steps and
Tackleway, that goes inland, parallel with All Saints’ Street, to the
back of All Saints’ itself?
[Illustration: OLD TACKLE-BOXES, HASTINGS.]
The “tackle-boxes” on the beach at Rock-a-Nore are a peculiar feature
of the fisherman’s quarter. They are tall, tower-like, black-tarred
wooden sheds of four or five storeys’ height, built in rows at
right-angles to the sea, and identified by letters of the alphabet.
In them are stored the nets and miscellaneous gear of the smacks.
Generally groups of depressed, guernseyed, weather-beaten smacksmen may
be seen and spoken with while mending their tackle, and are as unlike
the fishermen and longshore folk of the comic artists as well may be.
They are not so phenomenally broad in the “starn,” so pot-bellied,
nor so patchy; and, instead of having that little dense patch of
spade-beard, like the chin-beards of Rameses and other typical Egyptian
statues, as inseparable from the conventional fisherman as a nimbus
from the head of a saint, they are either very full-whiskered or quite
clean-shaven. But the conventional fisherman will no more become
obsolete than the conventional burglar with his ankle-jacks, his fur
cap, and his furtive glance; or the conventional John Bull. There is
nothing like them on earth, but they are necessary abstractions for the
feeding of unimaginative minds.
You may read in the guide-books how the term “Chop-back” will rouse a
Hastings fisherman to fury, and timid, yet inquiring people, approach
the subject with them apologetically; but I declare they turn a puzzled
look upon you, and seem hardly to comprehend the meaning of what is
supposed to be a very offensive name—“Hastings Chop-backs,” deriving
from the supposed descent of the Hastingers from those Norse rovers
whose terrible axes cleaved their enemies down the back from skull
to chine. Traditions of this undoubted antiquity are deserving of
all respect, and probably the Hastings fisherfolk are descendants of
those fierce rovers, but they are the mildest vikings it is possible
to conceive, and would no more think of chopping any one down the
back than they would dream of refusing a drink, even though the Blue
Ribbonites of the Mission Church are active among them.
“Fishin’ ain’t wot it wur” is the general verdict; neither for
“hur’n”—that is to say, “herring”—in the fore-part of the year, nor for
mackerel in the after; yet the fish-market on the Stade seems busier
than ever in the mornings, and over a thousand people subsist upon the
proceeds of the harvest of the sea. But the fisherman is forced to
cruise greater distances than before, the Channel being fished out and
clean-swept by trawlers. Indeed, to listen to the doleful talk of a
Hastings fisherman, one might think that not a single sprat or mackerel
swam the English Channel between the North Foreland and the Lizard.
Those who explore this corner of old Hastings will acquire odd pieces
of information from the fisherfolk. Rock-a-Nore, it will be found from
them, and from one’s own personal experience, is the coldest place in
the town; and, although they are not responsive to “Chop-backs,” they
tell you that “Bourne” (_i.e._ Eastbourne) men are “Winnicks.” They
look with disapproval on the new harbour-works; and are, indeed, true
Conservatives, for they instinctively think any change to be inevitably
for the worse.
Were I a fisherman I should, at any rate, resent the inference of
the Mission Church planted on the beach, in their midst, as though
an outpost of Christianity among the heathen. And such a mildewed,
blue-mouldy, repellent building! But perhaps the situation, at the
remote end—the _cul-de-sac_—of the beach, suggested the idea of
paganism, piracy, and all sorts of unchristian things, at Rock-a-Nore;
but if it be true that _Labore est orare_, then the fishermen are on
more certain ground than many of the prayerful people who missionise
them.
This is indeed, geographically, a dead-end, under the grey-white cliffs
of East Hill; and being so, the Hastings Corporation have planted here
those undesirable things—a mortuary and a dust-shoot. Next door to the
mortuary you see the grim, unconscious humour of a warehousing firm’s
announcement, “Tapner and Co. for Removals,” and at the end of all
things, where a gigantic stone and concrete groyne projects into the
sea, there is the town dust-destructor. Beyond is the perilous beach to
Ecclesbourne, where the toppling cliffs above and the treacherous tide
below often offer the unwary the unwelcome choice of being crushed or
drowned.
LIII
On the way from Old Town to New, passing a flagrant music-hall and
the hideous stucco semicircle of Pelham Crescent, you perceive, up
aloft, on the craggy cliff’s edge, the ragged ruins of the old Norman
Castle of Hastings, whose grey and mouldering walls are craggy as those
chalk cliffs themselves. It is a long, a circuitous, and an arduous
climb to the eyrie where that battered stronghold is perched, and
although superior persons scorn and abuse the lift that brings you
swiftly and without toil to that height, the elderly and the unduly
fleshy, Hamlet-like persons among them, “fat and scant of breath,”
take advantage of it, and archæologise easefully by the aid of modern
mechanism. But little remains to arouse enthusiasm or to employ
the pencil of the artist, and that which might have been, from its
situation, as imposing as the Castle of Dover itself, is but the matter
of a few speculative arches and grizzled masonry.
Ever since the historic period, and doubtless long before the era of
recorded things began, there existed a castle, or a fortified post,
on this lofty cliff-top, where the shattered ruins of Hastings Castle
still stand, few and almost formless—the long superannuated warden of
the town that has grown so great and has now absolutely no defences
against the foreign foe.
When the Normans came, they found defences of some nature here, and
hastened from their landing-place at Pevensey to seize and to more
strongly fortify them, as scenes in that graphic record, the Bayeux
Tapestry, show. The wooden walls, palisades, and outworks thus hastily
constructed by the Conqueror’s men were speedily discarded for a
permanent building of stone, and the grim hold thus erected was given
into the custody of the Norman Counts d’Eu; who, jointly with the
Abbots of Fécamp, were responsible for keeping open the sea-passage
between England and Normandy. This duty was laid upon those secular
and ecclesiastical personages in consideration of the rights granted to
the Count d’Eu in the Castle and the Old Town, and the lordship over
the “New Burgh” bestowed upon the Abbot of Fécamp.
Time has worked odd changes with Hastings and very thoroughly obscured
the ancient names, so that what was then the “old town” has been so
long and so utterly swept away and built over that its very existence
at any former time is unknown to all save Dryasdust and his brethren.
The old original “old town” stood, in fact, where the new town of
Hastings stands to-day, and the Old Town of the present time is the
“New Burgh” referred to in Domesday Book as the property of the Abbot
of Fécamp. Dryasdust, who is a very estimable person and a learned,
will tell you all you want to know about it—and much more; but he is
always so fully informed, and diverges so abundantly and promiscuously
into notes, parentheses, sub-heads, and innumerable asides of that kind
that he presently lands you in topographical swamps and mazes, and,
feeding you overfull of knowledge, gives you a severe literary and
antiquarian indigestion.
In short, to make a plain story of it, where modern Hastings stands,
practically level with the water, there spread, at the time when the
Battle of Hastings was fought, a quiet inlet of the sea. This was the
haven, the natural harbour of refuge against winds and waves, that
originally caused the site of Hastings to be selected for a port. It
would never have been chosen and settled had it been without shelter,
as it is now; and Hastings of to-day is merely an artificial growth,
like Brighton, Eastbourne, and many another seaside town, sprung up to
serve a century or more of holiday-making by the sea. The town, as we
see it to-day, would have been impossible had the place depended merely
upon fishing and shipping; for on this stark-naked foreshore, swept by
gales and raging seas, there is no shelter for vessels.
It was, in fact, the early silting up of this haven that led to the
utter obliteration of the original old town dependent upon it. When
the tide no longer flowed up to its ancient quays and wharves, their
use, of course, vanished, and they eventually disappeared. In those
long-departed days the Castle cliffs and a long reef of rocks extended
a considerable distance out to sea, and formed the natural protection
for this inlet; but in the course of centuries the sea made such
inroads that the protection at last disappeared, and the shingle, in
its easterly march, instead of being kept out in the Channel and on its
course, found entrance, and steadily, and by no means slowly, cut off
the haven from the outer waters.
Thus was the chief port of the famous Cinque Ports finally ruined
by the then irresistible forces of nature. Already, in 1205, it had
suffered political ruin; for, as the chief port in the intercourse
between England and Normandy, its trade became extinct on the severance
of the Dukedom of Normandy and the Kingdom of England, in the reign of
King John. Five years before even that event the port was far gone to
decay, for it could furnish but six of the twenty-one ships that in its
prime formed its contribution to the nation’s defence.
Apparently the inhabitants of the Hastings that bordered this haven
early realised its inevitable doom; and those of the neighbouring New
Burgh—the Old Town of our time—did not shift for themselves, to form a
harbour, until the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And even then they were
reduced to “sending round the hat” for contributions and donations from
more prosperous places. Pity the sorrows of a poor old port!
They were led to this course by the destruction of their old wooden
pier; but it was not until seventeen years had passed that sufficient
funds had been accumulated and a beginning was made in the spring of
1595. Even so, fate dealt hardly with the place; for although the new
pier was built “all of huge rocks, artificially pyled, edge-long, one
close by another,” so that it was considered highly permanent, it
needed only the first storm of the following winter to overthrow it.
Something daunted by this mischance, but not beaten, the Hastings
people built the pier anew, and of a different construction, with
“tymbor braces and barres, crosse dogges, and suchlike up to the top:
bowtyfull to behold,” and much else in that quaint way. Woe, woe! This
much-admired work had not stood a year when, like the earlier, it was
washed completely away. It happened on “All saints’ daie, 1597,” when
“appeared the mighty force of God, who, with the finger of his hand,
at one greate and exceeding high spring tyde, with a south-east wynd,
overthrew this huge worke in lesse than an hower, to the greate terrour
and abashment of all beholders.”
The inhabitants this time acknowledged defeat, and, recognising
the futility of further endeavour, folded their hands and did—that
easiest of things to accomplish—nothing. So, finally, ended the active
existence of Hastings as a Cinque Port.
It is true that projects were from time to time raised, but they were
never translated from words to deeds. At the beginning of the reign
of Charles the First a very promising scheme was reported, by which
a Dutch engineer, one Cranhalls, proposed to excavate and reopen the
ancient haven at a cost of £220,000; but the beginning of that reign
was also the beginning of trouble, and, as the condition of the country
at the time was unfavourable for the prosecution of public works,
nothing, again, was done.
Had it been possible to undertake those proposed works, Hastings at
this time would be a vastly different place from what it is. You are
to picture the scene—the bygone haven restored, and all that space
now occupied by the very centre of the modern town—the Queen’s Hotel,
the Albert Memorial, and Queen’s Road—a basin, with quays, wharves,
and warehouses. The thing could be accomplished to-day, were it
thinkable that the valuable house-property covering the site could be
removed; but what might have been done with vacant land has long become
impossible in a crowded town.
Yet, as the merest glance will show the casual visitor, the port and
harbour idea is not dead. In these days of questing after the seemingly
impossible—of eating your cake and having it too, of having things
all ways and every way to your own advantage, an aim which worries
individuals and corporations alike—it is not to be supposed that
Hastings should be content with its present condition. If it were,
it would be exceptional. But it is not. In the eyes of many who know
Hastings well and love it much, it is well enough; but the town will
never be content until it has acquired a harbour. It calls aloud for a
harbour, just as the proverbial baby cries for the moon, but with this
very important difference, that if it calls loud enough and long enough
it will eventually get that harbour.
Time was, as we have seen, when it had such a haven, duly provided
by Nature, and it now has, or had, a prospect of a newer, provided
by private enterprise; not on or near the old site, but to be formed
by building concrete piers out to sea from the East Hill and the
fishermen’s quarters. One such arm has for some years been completed,
but the works now appear to be finally abandoned, and all there is to
show for the expenditure of the matter of a hundred thousand pounds
is that long, unrelieved wall where the melancholy surges still sweep
toward an unprotected shore.
LIV
Modern Hastings, like Brighton, dates its rise from the ultimate
quarter of the eighteenth century, and its emergence from the status
of a fisher town is due to the same prime cause: the discovery by the
medical profession of fresh air and sea-bathing as specifics for that
mysterious eighteenth-century _malaise_, “the vapours,” and all manner
of other ailments. No royal favour, however, helped Hastings; only the
recommendations of Dr. Baillie in the first instance, and secondly the
fine brisk air of the place itself. Indeed, the climate of Hastings is
a matter of as great concern to the town as her looks to a woman: it is
her chief asset. You may read strange things of the Hastings climate,
and indeed of that of any seaside town whose business is to attract
visitors; and you will find, as a matter of curiosity, that Hastings
claims not one climate, but several, according to height and position.
Like the artful sinner who tried to get the best of both this world
and the next, Hastings wants it both ways, and would have you believe
it has actually got it, too. Thus, with a reminiscent shiver at the
thought of the winds we have faced elsewhere, we read appreciatively of
how the town is “screened from the biting blasts of the north and east
winds,” and open to the “healthful and uncontaminated vapours” from
the south and west, is saved from “the unwelcome calms which envelop
some holiday resorts.” This, I take it, is one in the eye for Bath,
for example, where in summer the visitor is stewed as effectively as
any prune, or for Torquay, whose “gridiron” even St. Lawrence might on
occasion find uncomfortably warm; while I think, on the other count,
the withers of Brighton and of Weymouth—among other places where the
east wind is capable of freezing your very marrow—are severely wrung.
In short, Hastings, by her own showing, is one of those favoured (not
to say miraculous) places each of which has the better climate than
any other, where the sun shines just so long and so brilliantly as you
please, where the winds are never rude and the air never stagnant, and
there are four hundred fine days (at the very least of it) to the three
hundred and sixty-five of every year.
When Hastings really did begin to rise it grew quickly, and speedily
overspread, not merely the old-time site, but brought into existence
the twin town of St. Leonards as well. Theodore Hook was as it seems
to us—strangely enthusiastic on the subject of those never-ending
terraces, squares, and streets of stucco, new in his day. Says he:
“Under the superintendence of Mr. Burton, a desert has become a thickly
peopled town. Buildings of an extensive nature and elegant character
rear their heads”—he meant, in plainer English, that they had been
built, only perhaps a phrase without those eloquent frills would not
have been “literature” as then understood—“where but a few years since
the barren cliffs presented their chalky fronts to the storm and wave;
and rippling streams and hanging groves adorn the valley which twenty
years since was a sterile and shrubless ravine.”
Something is decidedly wrong in that description. The “extensive”—might
he not equally well have said the “expensive”(?)—buildings and the
“thickly peopled town” we allow, but those “hanging groves” and
“rippling streams” are just the delightful objects the coming of
the octopus streets abolished, and Hook sacrificed truth to a showy
antithetical outburst.
I do not think Hook was sincere. I hope he was not, for surely one
would sooner forgive literary insincerity than such a perverse taste.
Lamb, who wrote of Hastings in 1823, we know was sincerity itself when
he said he loved town or country; “but,” he says, “if this detestable
Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out
their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty,
innutritious rocks, which the amateur calls ‘verdure to the edge of the
sea.’ I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for
the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs.”
_He_, at any rate, saw nothing of Theodore Hook’s “rippling streams
and hanging groves.”
“There is,” continues Lamb, “no sense of home at Hastings. It is a
place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and
stockbrokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with
the ocean, if it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it
ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no more, it
were something—with a few straggling fishermen’s huts scattered about,
artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it
were something.”
True; but all that is merely a memory. Something of that vanished
Hastings may be recalled by those who discover the Brassey Institute
in the centre of the town, and climb to where the collection of local
prints and paintings is housed; and something more of it may be seen,
still in being, by those others who prowl inquisitively in rear of
High Street, and there discover the old parish church of St. Clement,
fellow to All Saints. It stands in a tightly wedged corner, on rising
ground, surrounded by houses and puzzling alleys, and looks very
reverend. It is, in fact, over five hundred years old. An ancient
cannon-ball wedged into the western face of its tower is a relic of one
or other of the several hostile appearances off the town that were not
uncommon in the old days; but whether it be the evidence of Dutch good
marksmanship in the seventeenth century, or of French gunnery in in the
early eighteenth, there is no evidence to show. The corresponding ball
on the other side of the belfry window is by no means a miraculous
follow-on shot, but is an instance of the eminently British passion for
the _pendant_, for things to match and balance. Just as the average
householder must needs have a vase or a statuette on either side of
the clock on the dining-room or drawing-room mantelpiece, or else feel
uncomfortably one-sided, so the burgesses of Hastings were uneasy until
they had duplicated the insult some passing privateer had put upon
their town; and so one of these warlike objects is a sham.
[Illustration: ST. CLEMENT’S CHURCH.]
LV
I am told that Hastings discourages the “tripper,” and that no longer
do cheap day-tickets for weekdays or Sundays prevail. He is discouraged
because he brings his nose-bag with him, because his children grow
fretful and annoy the select, and because he brings no trade into the
town and is off again by nightfall. Thus, paradoxically, he is required
not to come because he goes so soon. But perhaps the delays and the
peculiar methods of the railways serve more certainly to discourage
that variety of holiday-maker. However that may be, no one can deny the
“popular” character of the holiday-making in August, which is not the
select season at Hastings.
Sunday cheap trips to Hastings were early and for long a feature,
and eventually roused the wrath of the Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest
Association. We need not here go into the rights and wrongs of Sunday
tripping; but should any one discover a little book called “The Story
of our Sunday Trip to Hastings,” published on behalf of that excellent
body, let him read it, and find therein a fund of unconscious humour.
The whole and sole intent and purpose of the book is to show, not
merely how sinful it is to take a cheap Sunday trip by railway—and
especially, it would appear, to Hastings—but how inevitably
uncomfortable and even disastrous it will be. It is a tale of how,
one August, a decent working man and his wife and little girl, and an
assortment of friends, tripped one Sunday to this seaside. They started
betimes—arising at four o’clock in the morning—probably with some
foreboding sense that if you want to journey anywhere by South Eastern
Railway it is well to get up in advance of the early bird, if not even
to start the day before. They drove to Charing Cross in a cab, and it
was already very warm. The cabman, indeed, “used a strong expression”
to enforce his opinion that they would find it very hot. I think we all
know the poetical phrase that cabman made use of.
Of course, the object being to paint this trip in very strong colours,
mischances early began; but the party need not have been quite such
fools as they are described. Passing over the inevitable dispute
with the cabman, we follow them on to the platform, where they saw a
porter slip and nearly get killed, whereupon “a sickening horror came
over them at the thought of the scene they might have witnessed.” As
for that, if you are to speculate upon the grisly “might be,” the
blood-boltered “if,” the catastrophic “may happen,” why then there is
no peace of mind for you at all, week-day or Sunday.
Friends who were to have been met on the platform were all but missed,
and when found insisted upon quarrelling with strangers and quizzing
other members of the party, until at length the train “ceased to
move, and we were at our journey’s end.” It did not just “stop,” as
ordinarily it does.
See now our party at Hastings. The day was blazing hot, and no shelter
was to be found. The glare off the sea seared their eyes, and they took
refuge in the streets, with the bitter reflection that they need not
have left their home in happy Islington to see pavements and closed
shops. Dinner was suggested, and they resorted to a dining-room, rich
in the mingled odours of sage and onions and tobacco-smoke, where they
dined off what purported to be gosling, but was really an old and
half-starved fowl. If the dishes were lukewarm, the room, on the other
hand, was blazing hot. “Mr. Peters,” one of the party, called for “malt
liquor”—could it by any chance have been “beer”?—and saw that somebody
else paid for it; and, this princely and elegant meal over, the party
dispersed in various directions.
Then the brilliant idea occurred to one who claimed to know Hastings
that a breeze and shady trees would be found in the Castle gardens, on
the cliff-top. They climbed that “terrible” road, only to find that
the gardens were closed on Sundays, and that, even had they been open,
no trees and no shade existed there. Finding at last some stunted,
insufficient trees, they rested awhile, descending only to give the
girl a chance of fainting in the heat.
And so the weary day dragged on until it was time to return home. They
all assembled at the railway-station, much to the reader’s surprise.
Why had not some of them taken a boat and been drowned, or been eaten
by a sea-serpent? Why had they not even missed the train? We shall
learn.
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day,” says the poet; but
disasters seem inevitably to wait upon those who “trip, trip, trip
it” to the sea on Sunday; especially if they dine upon emaciated fowl
sinfully masquerading as a young goose.
No appalling disaster happened to the swift South Eastern train. It
did not, strange to say, break down, and still less did it come into
collision with another. Nor even were train-wreckers prowling along the
line, to place obstructions upon the metals and so bring the sinful to
an appropriately ghastly end. No: nothing of that kind happened; but
when two-thirds of the journey had been accomplished a thunderstorm
broke. “Never mind, we’ll soon be at home,” said Martha. “Alas! it
seemed as if home grew more distant than nearer.”
But at last London was reached and an omnibus with difficulty found. On
the way, however, a horse, overworked with Sunday labour, fell dead,
and the journey had to be miserably finished in the rain. What, by the
way, would have been made to happen to a motor-omnibus? _That_ could
not fall dead.
The party reached home at last, but Martha fell ill, and eventually
died of consumption. “Never,” declares the supposed narrator of this
elegant piece of fiction, “shall I forget our Sunday Trip to Hastings.”
I should think not, indeed!
Let us therefore go to Hastings by road: and be sure it is not on a
Sunday.
[Illustration: A SLAIN NORMAN.
_Bayeux Tapestry._]
INDEX
Amherst, Sir Jeffrey, 71-74
Baldslow, 238
Battle, 188, 199, 228, 231, 232
—— Abbey, 188, 219-34
—— of Hastings, 188, 200-219
Bayham Abbey, 157-59
Beauport Park, 234
Bedgebury Park, 167
Bell Green, 25
Bellingham, 23
Bewl Bridge, 164
Bodiam Castle, 182-86
“Bohemia,” 237
Bromley, 4, 26-47
—— Common, 44-48
Carriers, The, 4, 10
Catford Bridge, 23
Chelsfield, 56
Chevening, 62
“Church in the Wood” (_i.e._ Hollington Church), 236
Coaches:—
Express, 7
Hastings Mail (afterwards Hastings and St. Leonards), 6-8, 54-56
Paragon, 7
Regulator, 7
Royal William, 7
United Friends, Sevenoaks, 78
Coaching, 3-10, 54-56, 63, 78
Coaching Notabilities:—
Gray, Robert, 6, 8
Horne, Benjamin Worthy, 6, 8, 78
Peacock, 78
Stockdale, 8-10
Corbett Estate, The, 24
Crowhurst Park, 234
Cyclists’ Rests, 141-43
Darenth, River, 69
Downe, 52
Dunton Green, 63, 66-69
Edward the Confessor, 189-93
Etchingham, 171-76
Farnborough, 52
Flimwell, 2, 108, 168-70
Forest Hill, 23
Frant, 140
Green Street Green, 53
Halstead, 64
Halton, 248
Hare, Augustus J. C., 239-46
Harold, King, 190-201, 209, 210, 214-19, 231
Hastings, 248-84
“High Rocks,” 137-40
Highwaymen, 48-52, 54
Hildenborough, 112
Hollington, 235
Holloway, 26
“Holmhurst,” 238-46
Hops, 144-53
Hop-pickers, 52, 111, 147-53
Hurst Green, 170-77
Inns (mentioned at length):—
Bell, Bromley, 43
Blackboy, Sevenoaks, 78
Blue Boys, Kipping’s Cross, 143
Bolt-in-Tun, Fleet Street, 6, 8, 9
Bricklayers’ Arms, Sevenoaks, 79
Cats (or Three Cats), Sevenoaks, 79-81
Chequers, Lamberhurst, 5, 157
—— Tonbridge, 118
George, Robertsbridge, 181
George and Dragon, Farnborough, 52
Harrow, Knockholt Pound, 58
Porcupine, Richmore Hill, 57
Star, Madamscourt Hill, 58
White Hart, Bromley, 43
—— near Sevenoaks, 104
John’s Cross, 188
Kipping’s Cross, 143
Knockholt, 57-62
Knole, 79, 84-102
Ladywell, 16
Lamberhurst, 4, 144, 153-57
Lewisham, 10, 11, 12-23
Lindridge Causeway, 144
Loampit Hill, 11
Lock’s Bottom, 48
London Bridge, 1
Longford, 69
Madamscourt (_i.e._ Morant’s Court) Hill, 62
Malfosse, 216
Mason’s Hill, 44
“Montreal,” 71, 74-76
Mountfield, 186
Neville Family, The, 141
New Cross, 1, 11
North, Lord, 120-22
“Old London Road,” 235, 238, 248, 250
Old Roar, 236
Old-time Travellers:—
Evelyn, John, 49-51
Islip, Archbishop, 104
Jeake, Samuel, jr., 4, 120
Walpole, Horace, 177, 180
Ore, 246
Pembury Green, 141
Pilgrims’ Way, 63
Polhill, 57, 65
—— Tunnel, 64
Pratt’s Bottom, 54, 56
Quaggy, River, 12
Ravensbourne, River, 11, 26
Riverhead, 70
River Hill, 105, 106, 108, 110-12
Robertsbridge, 177-82, 186, 188
Rother, River, 178
Rushey Green, 23, 25
Rushmore (or Richmore) Hill, 57
Sackville, Family of, 80, 87-98
Salehurst, 182
Scotney Castle, 159-64
Seacox Heath, 169
Senlac, 188, 199, 206, 231
Sepham Hill, 66
“Seven Oaks, The,” 104
Sevenoaks, 3, 76-84
Sevenoke, Sir William, 82
Shangden, 104
Silver Hill, 177, 180
Silverhill, 237
South End, 25
Star (otherwise Madamscourt) Hill, 63
Starr’s Green, 234
Stone Crouch, 140, 164
Telham Hill, 234
Toad Rock, The, 134-37
Tonbridge, 3, 4, 5, 112-20
Tonbridge Ware, 131-34
Tunbridge Wells, 3, 4, 5, 111, 120-37
Vine Hall, 188
Watch Oak, The, 199
Webster, Family of, 224-28
Whatlington, 188
Wilford, James, Benefactor to Roads, 106-108
William the Conqueror, 190-98, 203, 207-220
Woodgate, 4, 120
_Printed and bound by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld.,
London and Aylesbury._
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Hastings Road - And the "Happy Springs of Tunbridge"" ***
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